After Darkness Falls
by Clorinda
Summary: The bird cannot fly free forever.
1. Nighttime Ghost

**After Darkness Falls**

**By **Clorinda

**Rated**: PG

**Category**: Drama

**Summary**: The bird cannot fly free forever.

**Author's Note**: The idea was inspired by **The Invader Androgynous's** "My Boyfriend," which actually had me thinking that even if Akabane wasn't a wanted man, what would do _if_ he was one. And more importantly, _who_ would he turn to for help?

Believe me, answering those questions is pretty neck-breaking if I want to keep Akabane in character. (Somebody _please_ tell me if I botch him up.)

* * *

**Chapter One**

Himiko Kudo doesn't sit curled on her couch at nine o' clock in the night, letting the tendrils of beckoning sleep caress her. Himiko Kudo does not even stay at home, the tiny, messy, littered flat she lives in during the day, at nine o' clock in the night. For Himiko is the Lady Poison; she is the bat that sees in the light; she is never not working on a job.

But even the Lady Poison cannot control minds ... Criminal minds, to be true. And by no fault of hers that she can fathom, no one wants her for a transport job at nine o' clock in the night.

And so one may espy her on her battered, ancient couch, wrapped in a blanket she had saved from that ancient, abandoned, sun-filtered house she had inhabited with her brother and Ban. But time has passed, and she does not shiver and recoil with pure fury at the Mido boy's name anymore.

In fact, she has come to associate it with many things of importance to her thawing heart. Money, blueness, sophistication neither of them had then, good fun, and of course, Yamato, although it wrenches her to think it. But the good times shared with the two men in her old life cannot be pushed away like the gentleness of Ban's touch on her shoulder, and she dwells on it less, but treasures it more.

The light on the television screen changes and flickers, falling against the tanned complexion of Himiko's face, the young teenaged girl, folded miserably amid the cushions and a barely-salvaged blanket.

This is why the Lady Poison hates not having a job. Because without the burning taste of danger in her mouth, the scent of her perfume lining the clouds, constant movement and fear that keeps her mind from sifting through the sand and settling on memories— Himiko is only a sixteen-year-old child with some scraps of education and an empty life.

And she doesn't want to wake up in the morning, barely conscious, just able to see her own hand pressing the kitchen knife into the inside of her wrist, until she slumps on the floor, only to be found hours later as dead.

When the doorbell rings, she nearly screams.

Tearing the blanket off herself, and switching the television off, she answers the door in a loose man's shirt and baggy shorts. She is half-expecting Hevn, the woman's hair resisting the dampness of the night outside, her voice clipped and amused as she explains the job that requires the Lady Poison.

The door swings open on well-oiled hinges, and the dusty lights from the corridor spill onto Himiko's floor, on her bare, brown feet. Her gaze travels slowly upwards in true, dramatic fashion and her voice is falsely cheery as she greets,

"Oh, hey. Can I help you with something?"

He smiles, the small, ever-tactful, I-feel-so-rude-when-I'm-imposing gesture. "I hope it's not too late to be calling, Lady Poison. Could I come in?"

"Sure," and because she feels no animosity for this man who has given her little cause for hate except for the occasional, unintentional delay, she steps away from the doorway to grant his entrance, closing the exit behind him, following the sweeping black coat of Kuroudo Akabane.

Dr. Jackal seats himself on the couch, smiling at her with eyes closed, his hat resting lightly on his knees, as she sits near him, pulling out an art deco chair. He looks at it, before remarking, "I wasn't aware that the Lady Poison was so fond of the Cubists."

She flushes a dull red, before quickly saying, "It's a hobby."

"You're interested in art, then?"

She looks at him, her eyes trying to ascertain what he's leaning towards, and he smiles back with that same benign smile she's used to seeing each time she does a job with him. The same smile he gives to his people before he murders them in icy-cold blood.

"Why the sudden interest, Jackal?"

He looks properly abashed; perhaps it is just the right mix of mild surprise at discovering his own obtrusiveness and embarrassment for it. It is _too_ believable a blend to be believed.

"My apologies; I have only recently found how deliciously little I know about my colleagues and associates ... To say, for example, I know that the Get Backers often bill at that little, poorly-paid café, and yet I cannot say what are Ginji's tastes in food. Do you see what I mean?"

And it takes a lot out of Himiko to keep her eyes from rolling. "Pizza," she informs. "No anchovies, or Ban will be quick to steal them." Then again, she forgets Akabane frequents the richer diners of Shinjuku; he does not see the illustrious Get Backers every day, they are like ... celebrities, _idols_, to him. To be beheld and admired, but never to know up close enough to feel their breath.

Himiko prays that she will not be there when Akabane should find out that the Get Backers, despite their rolling success rate, have no money and have to mooch off a young waitress who is younger than themselves.

"Oh, I see. It is ... _illuminating_, although, I for one, prefer something more mellow."

There is something in his voice, and when Himiko glances up at him, uncrossing her legs again, she sees that his eyes, piercing blue-violet, are open.

And they are looking right into her.

"Akabane," she says. "This isn't really a social call, is it?"

He gives a mock-sigh. "Ah, I probably am getting old."

She shrugs. "You might. After all these years of not being concerned, why start about Ginji's personal life _now_? ... So, if there's something I can assist with, don't hesitate. Ask."

He smiles at her, but she doesn't feel the ghostly shiver trace her spine. The drowsiness of the night is gone; Lady Poison is alive. "Of course ... But first, could I trouble you for a cup of coffee? It has been a rather long night for me."

She nods quickly, and goes into the kitchen. She comes back later with a steaming mocha. "I hope you like the chocolate," she says with a wry smile.

"Very much actually," and his white-gloved fingers raise the cup to his lips.

The silence swirls around them, like waves and a rock in the sea, under the harsh-white light illuminating the flat. Akabane makes no move, casually sipping at the cup; Himiko feels her skin grow cold because a man like Akabane is proud, and proud men do not go on their knees.

Something is wrong, and she'll be damned if she cannot sense it right, after all those years of locking herself in a dirty basement with only her poison perfumes.

The soft sound, the gentle _tink_ of china against wood echoes. Himiko starts to see the cup on the table, Akabane's eyes on her; the sand clock had been turned.

"You were saying, Jackal?"

"I was." He smiles smoothly, and without the hat to obscure his upper face, the black coat holding to his thin shoulders, his eyes are placid, with the first and faint hints of trouble. No, _apprehension_.

"I would like to ask you for help."

Himiko freezes. The mercury has suddenly fallen too fast in this drawing room, under the harsh-white light.

Akabane does not ask for help. Akabane does not concede to weakness. Akabane will estimate the odds before he takes his gamble. Kuroudo Akabane will never drown in the ocean, because he will never walk on water.

Dr. Jackal cannot be afraid.


	2. Everybody Has Demons

**Author's Note**: Loads of thanks to **Amisuchan **for reviewing, and **Rabid Lola**, your compliment was very flattering, since I generally don't use this particular way of phrasing sentences unless it's with my original fiction. Thanks very much, really.

Also to **internal chaos, Editor Crawl** for the vote of confidence, and **Ardendaeas**, you flatter me. (And just for the record, you write really well.)

**IceDragon3**, there is no way in hell that I'd give up on this story; too sentimentally attached, I'm afraid ...:cuddles fanfic:

Yes, I'm afraid I found out the spelling of Gin**j**i's name with "Broken Vows," and I have managed to get off my butt and make the corrections. And to **Atropos' Knife**, thanks for the bit of info about Himiko. I've never read the manga (too deep-rootedly a illiteracy-in-Japanese person, sorry,) and okay, we can excuse the tiny slip-up, can't we:makes liquid eyes: Thanks for being frank. I'm not really sure Akabane's little scrape will seem all that impressive to anybody, but — :throws up hands in wild surrender: — it wasn't meant to be the prime focus, so I hope you won't grudge me for a teeny-weeny piece of Ooc-ness on his part.

And here's to hoping this chapter isn't too bad. :clinks flute against thin air:

* * *

**Chapter Two**

When the night is young, the demons come out to play.

Lady Posion is cold and efficient, but she is not the only other one Dr. Jackal works with. Settled in the passenger's seat of Mr. No-Brakes's truck, he watches the road, the cold, misty night, assured that the cargo is safe.

Nothing is _un_safe around the Treasurer, Shiro Takashi, the boy with the tattooed wrists who always looks too young and smiles too sadly before he kills when he is shoved to that brink. _Nothing_ is unsafe, not even human lives.

Which is why Dr. Jackal entertains his company as little as he can, but there are times when one must force away blatant unprofessionalism such as this, and do it, because without entertainment the sky is bleak and it always rains, and without money, life is a thorn slicing through you.

And doctors do not like to taste their medicines.

The truck rolls to a gradual halt. Dr. Jackal opens the door and alights. The Treasurer stands up, and gets down, too. Mr. No-Brakes, who is learning his lessons over the years, reaches over, and inserts a CD into the player. Unlike the Lady Poison's classic taste, hard, heavy rock pounds through the inside of the cabin of his truck.

"Eh, what is it, Jackal?" queries Takashi, blinded by the darkness and the rain that is starting to fall. Unlike the close-to-inhuman senses of the other man, Takashi is too young and fresh-faced for that, but arguments for and against his cause have been stated already.

"Shut up and listen," he shoots back with a snarl. The air is growing damp around them, the drizzle landing far too heavily on his shoulders. Visibility is all but gone without facial windscreen-wipers, but one does not easily mistake for something else what strikes one's ears as clear crystal.

"Oh, fancy _that_! I _never_ thought I'd see _you_ here, Dr. Jackal!"

Every emotion behind a voice that has never been surprised, comes tumbling out in a cascade of mockery, cruelness and scorn.

Takashi mumbles under his breath, something suspiciously close to a string of profanity, and jumps back into the truck, starting to secure the cargo with a series of locks and chains people have found amusing, since in effect, he always nails everything to the floor, before settling himself in front of it, guns and daggers drawn.

Jackal smiles, his lips tracing the enigmatic gesture, and calls out, his voice penetrating wind and storm,

"If the lady Asmodeus would have the grace to show herself from where she's hiding, I'd like to fight her, please."

He is responded to by a laugh, high, tinkling and derisive.

"I'm _so_ sorry, Jackal, but I don't seem to mind being called ... gasp! _Dirty_-_handed_."

"To be expected," he calls back cheerily, letting his gaze flit beneath the wide brim of his hat. Deserted highway; terrible weather conditions with good drizzling, fog and wind; craggy drop around the corner ... He can almost laugh at her well-tuned sense of geography, but the heart clenching, unclenching in his throat is choking him.

Asmodeus, as he as so far been able to tell, is of hermaphroditic properties, but he has seldom encountered her; mostly up-close when she tries to kill him.

An innocent man who had once survived her, had whispered brokenly in a bar, "Asmodeus — that's what name she had — horrendous — horrendously beautiful ... God — help us..."

* * *

Dr. Jackal cannot be afraid.

"Go on, Akabane. I'm good to listen."

There is a slightly steely edge to his voice. "You do, I hope, recognize this as a matter of utmost importance. Otherwise I would not have bothered..."

"I know, Akabane," She all but snaps it at him, her frayed nerves sparkling with electric impulses at the synapses as would have done a boy like Ginji proud. She allows a fleeting smile to reassure him of her goodwill, but the gesture is annulled by the coldness creeping into his eyes.

Resentfully, she wonders where he lost his sense of better humour, so that the Get Backers can retrieve it for him. _Focus_, Himiko.

"Good." He pauses, not as much collecting his thoughts, but searching for what he should tell, and what should be omitted from her ears and memory. "I'm sure, Lady Poison, that you know what a job gone askew is like to a professional."

She nods. Ban has done to her too many times— more so to him.

"Regrettable experiences of one's career, I'd say?" He peers over the rim into the half-finished cup of mocha, all the while aware of her eyes staring at him, wondering what makes him stall so much. "This time it wasn't worth sticking around until the end for."

"I see what you mean." Was it the Get Backers? Ban and Akabane have been on a rocky precipice since the last turn at Maze City. Himiko feels the shiver ripple under her skin. "And I wish you'd get to the point; your time is not mine, Jackal."

His eyes harden. The violet depths freeze over. "Fine then," and she suspects he exercises a harder grip over his anger than she does over his. "I need your help. I've said that. I—"

Falters away. Himiko muscles clench. She looks at him, and something loosens the knot in her chest. Akabane's eyes. They are perhaps the only part of him that he cannot help.

For a man so determined to be cool, aloof, amused in the mirror Death holds, his eyes betray him. Each and every time. She smiles thinly inside. He looks pained almost, humiliated and ashamed to admit this.

Deep inside, she cannot stop the flicker of pity.

She wonders if—

"I need a place to stay tonight."

There. It lies in the open. Akabane's back is as straight as it was; he is not rigid, he does not display what it costs to beg for shelter. But can he help it? Where does one go if one has a psychotic madman on one's back?

— Especially if one has no friends.

"A place to stay?" Her words fall from her throat in a thought-deprived, hollow echo. "Why?"

"I'm afraid I can't tell you that. Only that my own quarters would be very unsafe tonight." Briefly, he wonders why he hadn't found the brainwave to ask Takashi the Treasurer to protect his life tonight.

The mirthless answer returns to him.

Takashi is dead.

A rusting metal crowbar plunged through his chest.

Asmodeus sweeping for his throat, Dr. Jackal ducking low, voices yelling in the wind, the scream of tyres as Mr. No-Brakes spins the wheels and drives away, cargo and all.

Images, wild and blurred, fly past his head, shrouding Himiko once more from sight, jerking him away to a cold, blustery evening where the mist protects the killer.

* * *

Backed against the steepest drop, the grille-boundary protecting cars from driving off the edge of the hill road, pressing into his back. Asmodeus's shadow splaying everywhere in the darkness, her high, shrill laugh, curdling his skin.

"_Watch me_, _Jackal_! _Watch me as I tear you_—"

He hadn't waited. Only fools stay long enough to finish a losing fight. Only fools prefer being murdered to death. He'd not waited to be killed.

A jackal-man's feet leaving the ground, spiralling through the air, falling, hurtling, dropping past the crag, dashing, meeting, running down towards the hard, solid ground.

But he hadn't met the stony earth. A deafening splash. Icy coldness plunging into his flesh. Burning erupting over his face, his arms, his body on fire. Everything dissipating into blackness.

* * *

"I'd appreciate it more, Lady Poison, if you could lend me some cotton swabs and a bottle of iodine."

He blinks quietly to clear his eyes of the evening that preceded this night. Himiko nods, and goes to get what he wants. He remains on the couch, his eyes closed now to block out with one massive blow, the stinging agony of the cuts lining his skin, the memory of pitching himself into a heavy-current river.

"Oi, here you go."

Eyes open. They settle on Himiko, who is back faster than what he estimated. She sets down a labelled glass bottle, three quarters empty to prove that she too has faced his predicament, and a plastic box of fluffy cotton.

"Thank you."

_Bguk_.

The lights all around them suddenly go out.

**

* * *

Author's Note: "Asmodeus" and Shiro Takashi are, yes, OCs, mine, the drill. Asmodeus, as far as I know (or I think I know) is the chief demon of people of Jewish faith; and the devil of those who commit the third deadly sin, lust. I'm afraid "Asmodeus," theological and mine, has an unspecified gender from what I've found, but in all probability is male. HAS to be. (Stupid chauvinists ... who are also dead by now.)**

I know Mr. No-Brakes's name appeared in the big Jackal-Himiko-Ban Confrontation episode, but I saw it only once in my life, and I wasn't even that interested in the anime then. So, if anyone could supply me with Mr. No-Brakes's real name, I'd be much obliged.

And long and boring chapter? I'm really, really sorry about that. I just had a lot of explaining to do, and I hadn't expected it to take a whole chapter like that. But next chapter onwards I make a better headway, really.


	3. Be Afraid of the Dark

**Author's Note**: **Ardendaeas**, I really hope you like this.

**Editor Crawl**, I'm really flattered about what you said about the last chapter's creep-potential, since the thriller-genre isn't really my thing no matter how hard I hit at it. Nice to know you liked it. It's also lovely to have someone who actually understands how evil plot bunnies hold themselves hostage, when a writer desperately wants to update fast— so thank you!

**kemurikat**, thanks a lot about Mr. No-Brakes's name. Maguruma ... "it's all coming back to me now..." (Sorry, my mum's playing Celine Dion on the stereo right now, but the chit of information was more helpful than you can imagine! I seriously need Mr. No— Maguruma for this story, so I appreciate it.) I'm sorry if this update wasn't as fast as it could be; you guessed right: my muses have deserted me— all nine of 'em. And no, I doubt they ever revealed Akabane's past, (since fanfic writers are still playing the guessing game) and I'm not even going to _try_ take out that enigma that is Dr. Jackal.

On the subject of onomatopoeias, **Crystal Haze**, it's true "_bguk_" doesn't exist. As you know this city of ours that sleeps too much (and over-eats too), never runs low on blackouts. So, "_bguk_" was the best way to describe what I heard before the electricity ran out on me. (Then again, "_bguk_" was the sound the light bulb made before it blew a fuse simultaneously with the blackout, but I figured that out much later.)

**Lady Adyra**, your compliments were overwhelming. I rather wonder if you took a college course in praise, because a believable Dr. Jackal is something I have always admired in other people's fanfics, but never thought I'd get down to pat. I realise Himiko's characterisation is a bit gappy, but that's primarily because I haven't found a way to focus on her like I've focused on Akabane. Which is funny, since this story is mostly going to be from Himiko's POV. Akabane will exist like Julius Caesar existed in the namesake-play (although I draw little parallel with Shakespeare ... Peter Lamont, perhaps :dazzling grin: ...) What you said about my writing, thanks! I'm still under and below fifteen!

**Ice Dragon3**, thanks! Akabane-Himiko interaction might not appear again for a while, but Asmodeus (thanks for what you said) _was_ responsible for the blackout— probably tripped the power or something like that. What the connection is with Jackal, you'll find out soon enough. (That was primarily why I wanted to know Mr. No-Brakes's name, actually.)

And you guys will never know how nice you've been to Asmodeus. Normally, I'm jumpy around OCs, good or bad, and after this chapter, Asmodeus goes on hiatus. I have Himiko's side of the story limned out nicely, but Jackal is the crowbar in the cogs of my brain, so I really can't foretell if Asmodeus will stay for a final showdown.

(That's not from missing plot bunnies; I'm just crap at action scenes.)

And to make up for the last chapter, stuff finally happens. I swear they do. I just hope you get why I use "Jackal" instead of Akabane in places, and why "Lady Poison" is interspersed with the writing like "Himiko" is.

* * *

**Chapter Three**

"Shoot! Blackout."

Trapped in the darkness, where the devils hide.

Himiko fumbles in the dark, searching for the table, the chair, anything to hold to in this disembodied sensation of nothingness. "Jackal! Where are you?"

"Right here," replies his cool voice. "Does this happen to you often?"

She wonders fleetingly if he's still sitting on her couch, hat on his knees, calm and collected. "Not that much, really."

"Then it's deliberate." _Asmodeus_. He feels almost flattered that she's chosen to follow him thus far.

"What're you talking about?" Himiko finds it difficult, uneasily so, to be carrying a conversation in the dark with a man who kills for pleasure and on demand, and it does not help that while he is "friend," he is also cheerfully broaching the topic of conspiracy theory.

As it seems, terror is something that can be hidden far better than what even people of their stature, think.

"Merely saying that there might be somebody by the fuse box downstairs, 'round the back, with a pair of pliers, that's all." There is the sound of rustle and cloth, as Dr. Jackal stands up, carefully inching his way around the furniture he has seen for the first time.

"Wait. Does this have anything to do with why you came here?"

"I suspect so, yes," Inwardly, he curses for not having a beacon in this hour of blackness, and arms outstretched like a voodoo doll, glad that no one can see, he feels his way gingerly towards the pushed-open window fitted into the far wall, from where the street lights come pouring in.

"If you came for help, Jackal, why don't you _let_ me help— instead of running away like I suspect you're doing right now?"

He cannot see Himiko anywhere, her breathing soft and even, spreading through the air. He cannot concentrate on that, his mind straying to Asmodeus over and over again.

"Because there's no time."

Briefly, he wonders if she has reached the landing by now, and as his acutely-stinging knee knocks painfully into a table, he catches it before it can sound, skirting around it to safety. The light silhouettes him as he comes closer to the window.

He feels a hand on his shoulder. It is Himiko. She has been closer than he had realized.

"I guess the whole thing's off then?"

Someone demurely knocks.

Dr. Jackal feels his blood grow colder. "I have to go. Now." His fingers fumble with the catch at the window, and brusquely, Himiko pushes him aside, and does it faster, shoving the glass panes open.

"There. Go."

He nods briefly, leaping on the sill. He is five stories above the air, and glancing down he tries to estimate how hard he shall have to fall. There is a drainpipe fixed outside the wall, and fleetingly he considers enlisting its help.

But he doesn't know how to climb.

Then, jump it is. Fall and break your neck? Too bad.

Lady Poison's paling face flashes. "What're you waiting for?" she hisses.

Jackal snarls. "Alright, I'm going then." He grips the window frame, steeling his resolve. He turns back again. "Remember to tell no one."

"I won't."

He nods. "I should hope so." A pause. "One more thing, Himiko. _Don_'_t_ open the door."

And he jumps. She watches him fall.

Silence.

He lands on his knees, dropping neatly in a crouch that sends the impact smashing up his bones.

The night is suddenly deathly quiet, and he doesn't move. He cannot.

She is still standing at the window; he doesn't look back up, or at the shadow she casts. The wind whispers.

White flashes. His gloved hand shoots out to grasp the bottle before it falls to break.

He stands up smoothly. And walks away. Not once looking back. Not back at the window. Because it is empty. Himiko is gone. And soon, so will he.

* * *

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Open up.

Can't. A professional murderer asked me not to. Sorry!

Himiko presses her back into the wall, guarding her breath. Halfway shielded by the couch a yard in front of her, she doesn't move, her hand reaching down, past her knees, towards the floor in front of her, where taped underneath the coffee table-surface, is a small glass phial.

Unfortunate for any intruder knocking at Lady Poison's door in the middle of the night. It is not a bottle of iodine that she wants this time.

Of course, she thinks, there may be a harmless, guileless individual of little individualistic properties, waiting for her outside on the landing, but, Lady Poison reasons, the aforementioned nondescript man wouldn't be lightly (_daintily_ almost) tapping at the door, instead of a few, solid knocks.

'One more thing, Himiko. _Don_'_t_ open the door.'

Her breath catches and twists in her throat, falling out in a ragged noise. For all her experience, she finds it impossibly hard to see why she's doing this. Shoved like this into a situation she can't comprehend, or command.

_She can_'_t tell why she_'_s taken Jackal at his word enough to be afraid of what he said_.

The knock comes again.

A soft, wailing scream as the door swings open on the rusting screws of the hinges. She strains in the dark, but nothing happens. The silence floods back like the deluge, the hearts crashing against chests in the darkness.

No one speaks. Everything listens, even the silence.

She asks the empty air, the absent Akabane, who it is that the jackal is running from. Who rouses his hate and fear. And why that embodiment of the worst of human emotion is here to prey at Himiko's door.

The clock on the wall ticks softly. She wants to uncork the phial in her fist, let the poison line the air, but caution grips her wrists with iron chains of refrain. If Dr. Jackal should choose to run, what chance has _she_ left?

Her throat finds it hard to breathe, as she counts the seconds in her head. At one-hundred-and-fifteen, her thumbnail flicks off the cork. Glittering dust trembles the air, a sheen settling over the darkness. In that quarter second of pseudo-light, Himiko realises her folly.

Lunging forward, she re-captures as much of her perfume as she can, firmly trapping the poison where she can control it. Pocketing it, meaning to tape it under the coffee table again, she goes to switch on the lights, and make herself coffee.

Because the flat is empty otherwise. No one at the door.

* * *

Haunted. Even as a quarter of an hour lapses aside, and he breaks out of his run, pace slowing, he feels haunted. Hunted. Like the shadow walks, coiled around his heels. Once that shadow was life, now it is fear.

Akabane only teaches himself to walk faster as the rain, once more comes crashing down from the sky. There is a closed pharmacy on the side of the street, and he makes a dash for it, tucking himself under the extended roofing. He pulls off his gloves, and draws off the coat, rolling back his sleeves.

The hat remains, violet eyes, alight with malevolence, watching through the rain, the shadows and silhouettes that dart to and fro.

Rain falls, never stopping. An hour gone. Heart pounding over the sound of the downpour.

Akabane finally stands, knowing that he cannot out-wait the tempest. He puts the coat back on, repositions his hat better, and starts down the pavement to search for a few days' shelter. Home, he reflects, is where only the ludicrously stupid would attempt to visit.

He has very few items of personal belongings in his littered flat, every item Asmodeus will have undoubtedly gone through and returned to its reserved place by now. If he is to walk in there, he will find the same mess, the same clutter, the same hardly-evanescent residue of tearing urgency that makes Dr. Jackal human and at the same time, laughable.

An empty house lies west, less than a mile down the same road that Akabane sets off on. He takes half-an-hour to arrive, the crumbling paint, the misted windows, the broken hinges and the half-smashed door of a once-quaint cottage locked in the heart of Shinjuku and its high-rise towers and demons.

No one home.

Just as well.

The door closes strainedly behind him, and only the moonlight stumbling through the glass panes, illuminates the dust-kissed floor and broken shards of glass and china. There is too little furniture, and Akabane doesn't explore.

A small, overturned box awaits him beneath the window, and he takes his seat, dropping the coat. Once more, he peels off his shirt and rolls up the sleeves of his trousers, (cuts and gashes and healed and fading scars dance across his pale-ghostly skin) and he reaches into the recesses of his pockets to find Himiko's little gift.

The bottle is sticky to touch because of the liquid that has often spilled over the mouth. Akabane feels it coat the inside of his gloves, as he gingerly unscrews the cap.

He admires Himiko for many things, and her fast and quick thinking is one of them. He does not know how he would have wasted the night, or what is left of it, if she had not the sheer presence of mind to throw down to him that quarter-left bottle of iodine.

Although it would have helped if she had also tossed down some cotton.


	4. Waking Up To Tomorrow

**Author's Note**: I am _so_ absolutely sorry that I am _this_ late. I can't even come up with a decent excuse, except that writer's block lifted way too late.

**Ardendaeas**, wow, that's one of the nicest compliments anyone's ever paid me about imagery and atmosphere-setting. The flooring last line always works better with my one-shots and short stories (especially original fiction), but to hear it works elsewhere, thank you, thank you, thank you!

**Rabid Lola**, I'm indebted once more. Thanks for pointing out the typo in my otherwise squeaky-clean track record. Asmodeus and frightening? Wow, thank you! And what's wrong with Mr. No-Brakes and rock::jumps bodily into a ridiculous defensive!Bruce Lee stance:: And seriously, thank you for the compliment about Jackal and being on the lam. (Yeah, you're late, but your feedback is more invaluable than time ... Okay, that might sound corny, but really, I mean it.)

**kemurikat**, thank you! The poetry compliment was sweet. I always thought my poetry sucked royally, but really what you said about muses really made sense ... I believe it, but I just wish someone would tell _them_ that as well.

**IceDragon3**, wow, gee, thanks. You're compliments always make me wonder if I actually deserve them. Black humour— wow!! The knock-knock joke was very typically me being plain farcical. I thought it looked kind of stupid, but heck, a lame joke is better than none at all, since I'm not _deliberately_ making this an angstfic (I've already done enough.)

**Namine-chan13**, thank you; I'm sincerely flattered, since there are so many GB fics that are definitely better-written than mine. Akabane's characterisation was "unique but still fits?" I hope you aren't being too polite to tell me it shows him off-kilter!) I really will like to know what you think of him at the end of the story (I'm thinking of making Himiko visit his house, but it's an idea that's still not left the drawing board.)

**The Shah of Blah**. ::flourishes::

How nice. I've never been flamed so indiscriminately before by someone who's honest enough to be so openly intolerant. I doubt you're reading this, but I'm leaving it here temporarily until I can hunt out where you're squirreled in cyberspace. And thankyouverymuch, I don't write with "this weird, affected air,"— I happen to write with a coherent, grammatical air and if you didn't like it, didn't grasp the plot or some other troubleshooting problem, I do believe there are politer ways of going about it. (Unless of course you are a regular foul-mouthed little brat with a cute Internet _pseudonym_.)

Still, it's flattering that you went through three whole chapters— considering how badly the first suffered a full blast of purple prose. (And yes, it's _supposed_ to look different from my usual writing style.)

* * *

**Chapter Four**

Sunlight. Blinding whiteness.

Akabane struggles to sit up, an incessant feeling of hammering pain massaging the muscles of his back. He blinks twice, and reaches for his gloves and hat. Sunlight is pouring copiously through the dusty windows fixed high up the wall, and settling the hat, he climbs to his feet.

The floor.

The _floor_. He slept on the cottage _floor_. A shudder rakes him as he walks towards the door, fully prepared to leave. His clothes have dried thankfully, and his cuts are healing. The sun beats down on the part of him standing outside the doorway, and he stands, halted in time, pondering which course of action to take.

Asmodeus looms over the back of his mind, like a spider shadows the insect caught in its web. A tiny, sardonic smile crosses Akabane's lips.

_One would die for the other to survive_, and even without this turning into an epic battle of a hero's sacrifice, there is the nagging suspicion that _he_ would be the one facing the blank conditions of rigor mortis first.

Oh, he's hardly being pessimistic, or even weak-hearted. It is a mere practicality.

To anticipate your death successfully removes all chances of ever being surprised.

* * *

Himiko wakes in the morning, a night's hard slumber behind her, as she swings a leg over the other side, straddling the motorbike and she turns the key, shooting in one straight bullet-like motion out the garage.

She has not had breakfast, but she doesn't liked the lumpy taste of buttered bread in her mouth. She chooses instead to drive straight to where she normally (doesn't) likes to go: the Honky Tonk.

The cute little silver bell tinkles, heralding her entrance as she slips in, taking off the helmet (for no one doesn't fear death; more precisely, no one wants to die ignobly— found crushed dead in a road accident) as she searches for Ban.

"Himiko!"

Natsumi Mizuki is worth waking up in the morning for, and Himiko returns her smile, moving towards a booth to wait.

"Ban isn't here yet," she calls from behind the counter, starting up the coffee machine, smiling sweetly, and with a start, Himiko catches onto the fact that "Ginji's" name is not there in that piece of intelligence. She spins around to confront Natsumi with that, but the little waitress has turned to an overly-dressed woman looking a nineteenth century tart, who has just come in through the door.

Himiko turns back to the scuffed tabletop, trying not to look at the coffee Natsumi is serving. The smell wafts over to where she is, but coffee never agrees with her. Her fingers drum on the tabletop, playing a staccato rhythm, a devil's tattoo.

Conversation floats over her; the customer is a talkative one, and her voice is low, musical, blending with Natsumi's polite enquiries. Himiko is bored; she looks at the stranger perched sideways on the barstool, trying not to be swept away by the beads and jewellery and the long flowing velvet dress, which all look garish when held against the neat, orderly, picture-taken backdrop of the café.

Paul doesn't glance at the woman, though. He is reading the morning paper, and Himiko can just barely fathom out the headline from afar:

"DROWNED SAILORS RECOVERED; COAST GUARD ACCUSED IN SHIPWRECK."

She sighs softly.

* * *

Ban Mido despises the early morning. Dawn is that hour of sunlight breaking into silent chasms; and while Ginji sleeps, snoring imperceptibly, he climbs out of the car, lighting a cigarette as he leans back against the hood.

He has not been able to break that pattern since he met the Thunder Emperor.

The morning mist surrounds him, dissipating slowly in the cool breeze. The taste of the cigarette is warm on his lips. Memories are warm too, when he remembers the best ones, and they caress his skin with icy cold when he remembers them.

Because those best memories are of Yamato and Himiko. Of the roof they shared. Of the lives they led. And of the day all three of those lives died.

And some twisted ream of logic in the ugliest of thoughts, reminds Ban how that death is to be cherished, because if Yamato had never died, nothing would have made him find Ginji, because never would he have recognised another boy needing salvation.

"Ban?"

Ginji struggles into consciousness, the smell of cigarette smoke in his nostrils. His friend and business partner doesn't hear that groggy, half-awake mutter, and he sits up, feeling the numbness in his knees too sharply to be able to walk over to Ban.

But even if he could, Ginji Amano will do no such thing. Sometimes he thinks Ban has too many demons. Too many to put to flight. And even if he knows Ban hates them, he wonders if Ban knows not all demons are bad.

* * *

The garishly-dressed woman has still not left, and Himiko finds the scratches on the tabletop just unamusing enough not to be able to dispel this choking boredom.

The bell tinkles again. Himiko all but shoots up from her seat, watching Ban and Ginji amble in.

"Hi, Himiko," the latter of them greets her, and the other just looks at her, pushing up the tinted lenses, before turning away. In that singular gaze, had lain a thousand lingering emotions.

Which freeze Himiko in her tracks.

Natsumi places a plate of steaming pancakes on the counter. They smell good, and she has obviously made them herself. She doesn't take payment either, even if they can pay for it.

Ginji smiles; Ban laughs to see her transparent delight.

"Oi, Ban!"

He turns, swinging his muscled legs over the other side of the barstool so that he can face Himiko as they speak. "Yeah?"

"You did a job last night?"

"Yeah, we did."

She finds herself irked by the glint in his eyes, that bored, indolent glint that demeans her feelings, demeans her, makes her wonder why he is still able to breathe unscathed.

"Did you—" She bites her tongue, not knowing what to say, lest she be not taken seriously. "Did you meet Akabane?"

"_Jackal_?" Ban's eyebrows rise in incredulity, confusion and denial. "That psychotic sicko? Nah; I haven't seen him in a seriously long while. Why?"

"We were in Hokkaido, Himiko," adds Ginji with such plain simplicity that Himiko swallows down and chokes on the small shriek of surprise.

"Well, thanks anyway." She makes to stand up, pressing her palms against the table to ground herself, steady her, and then she walks out the door. She doesn't want to face Ban's narrowed eyes burning into her retreating back.


	5. All Men Are Strange

**Author's Note**: I'm sorry that I haven't updated in so long, but recently I've been having a crazy time with my Internet connection, and fed up, I decided to give the whole thing a break instead of trying every single day. (It's kind of scary how long it took for me to get back on track.)

And I'm pretty sure I won't get tired of bragging about this, but along with **Crystal Haze**, (who definitely goes a notch higher above me) and another friend of mine, I shall be representing our school in a State spelling bee (officially, it's called something else) this December. (A hundred –plus schools and ours. I think a hundred-plus pins just jammed into me, or they're just the butterflies.)

**omasuoniwabanshi**, wow, I absolutely had _no clue_ you liked the **Get Backers** fandom. Honestly, I'm flattered you liked this fic. The compliment was really, _really_ sweet. I won't be surprised if I wake up tomorrow, unable to get off the bed because my head is too inflated to balance my body-weight.

**Rabid** **Lola**, glad you liked it. My brain was starting to ache the way I was taxing it to maintain a more-or-less steady flow from the absolute first chapter, so the first chance I got to mellow the storyline, I jumped it. Really, it was the only way to keep me from going crazy. I know that's a lame excuse, but anyway, I'm glad you liked the chapter.

**ANBU Jounin Kimiko**, wow, _thank_ you. If you ever read some of my previous stories, (even some on this website) you'd be _appalled_ by how amateurish I can sound in my writing.

**Crystal Haze**, thanks for the thumbs-up.

**Ardendaeas**, yeah, I missed you, but it also took me impossibly long to get this chapter written. I'm not entirely satisfied, since Akabane isn't fulfilling his creep-potential. Thanks for what you said about my story. Wow! High school freshman? You're older than me, then! Dammit, you've gone and given me an inferiority complex since I'm evidently younger than everyone I know on this website. (Btw, did you get your ransom paid? Or did you run from Evil's clutches?)

** Raving Psychotic**, wow, I'm honestly, _honestly_ flattered. Your review really swept the cobwebs out of my brain, making me finish this chapter faster.

"...and not to mention being unable to jump 5 floors without suffering some anxiety and injury (though in anime and manga everyone seems to be able to accomplish gravity-defying feats...lol)" That's a jolly polite way of pointing out the _biggest_ discrepancy I've ever written. ::hides under bed:: I totally forgot the GB cast and crew ignores what we call gravity.

**Namine-chan 13**, ooh, one compliment after another! I bet I sounded like I was fishing for praise, but 'nyway, thanks a lot for the confidence-booster. Here's to hoping the rest of the story won't disappoint you. Cheers.

** Ichigo**, if _I_ can't stand to be criticized, _you're_ too scared to confront me face-to-face about it. (Isn't that why there's no e-mail ID, no hyperlink after your name?) Oh sure, I widely accept that I'm not the only smart one here, (proven by the fact that it's Stephen Hawking's name in the media, and not mine) but you're a snub-nosed little bugger in cyberspace whose criticism I would have appreciated had he (?) not epitomised buffoonery (not even criticism.) Oh sure, I can't take criticism. I steam and rant for hours before I'm able to look what the other person's said objectively, and I looked at yours with a pretty cool head— A. You're a shrimp for previously cited reasons. B. If I can't write, I think my readers (who, btw, are _smarter_ than I am) would have been fed up and given up on me a long time ago. I'm grateful they haven't, and I think it proves to me, more than it proves to you, that I can't be bothered about profane loud-mouths. If you should clean your mouth, and re-state your critical observations to me, I'll be prepared to listen.

**PS**. I feel stupid for not having mentioned it in the last chapter, but did anyone like the cameo of Asmodeus in **Chapter Four**?

**

* * *

**

**Chapter Five**

Gozou Maguruma, for all his bulk and rumbling voice and seedy laughter, eludes her with the dainty grace of a butterfly. Himiko Kudo's lips twist in annoyance, as she reaches over and switches off the radio, and sinks into the art deco chair of the drawing room.

Three days flown past the evening Akabane had been here. She wants to think that his essence lingers here, but she knows that is stupid. Every trace of Akabane is gone, and had it not been for the vial of poisoned perfume missing from underneath the coffee table, Himiko would have suspected she was deceived.

Evening news broadcasts, she decides, are completely useless. They have only, so far, reported the brutal murder of a boy, a Shiro Takashi, who garnered no respect from anybody anyway: an over-Gothic teenager who was found dead, killed by a crowbar puncturing him.

Himiko has heard of the description of the boy before, but she cannot connect the face to the body. She doesn't need to, anyway. There are more pressing things now; things that tie her to bastards like Dr. Jackal with unbreakable white thread. She has promised to help him; and so like him, Lady Poison cannot break her own word.

Her feet tap on the drawing room tiles. She has not heard from Akabane since; she has not tried to contact him either. She has hunted endlessly for Maguruma, though, and she thinks this is getting useless.

Yet that fellow is the only lead she has; the only thing she can hold aloft from the entangled spider's web at her feet.

She decides to try again. If today is Wednesday night, then there is little chance she might find Maguruma in one of the dimmer Shinjuku bars; and anyway, she has been told, Mr. No-Brakes's chauffeuring service has been in great demand all week.

And as if on cue—

The phone rings.

One sharp, high-pitched mechanical beep, before the receiver flies off the cradle.

"Hello? Himiko Kudo speaking."

A spasm, almost, of static, before a low, husky voice comes to life. "Lady Poison. My name is Idashi, and I have something of great value that I need to have taken out of the city."

"I'm listening,"

"I very obviously cannot speak more specifically now; there are people who are listening,"

Briefly, Himiko wonders if this is real life or a commercial thriller on television.

"Where can I meet you then?"

"There is a restaurant where I might see you. One of the newer projects. If you open today's evening paper, you shall find the name. I will be there until midnight tonight."

A click, and he has hung up.

Half-amused, Himiko sets down the phone. The evening paper. This man had gone into a great depth of trouble to conceal himself, and he had so easily left it up to her to find out why. But, she wonders, who is likely to have an evening paper?

Then she smiles, for it is a stupid question. She is well aware that a certain gentleman at the Honky Tonk might be very obliging.

Her house keys are on the table, and despite the disjointed rain-showers, she thinks she will be fine without an umbrella. She pulls on a jacket anyway, and yanks open the door, wondering if she should take a cab or her bike—

Either way ending up crashing blindly into Ban Mido who is standing outside her door.

"Himiko?"

"You!"

Heavily stunned by the collision, Ban falls back a step, holding a hand against the doorframe to steady himself; his eyes never leave Himiko.

"I need to have a word with you."

Himiko blinks, steeling herself inside for a fight. "I don't have the time for it, Ban; why don't you take a number?"

"I need to have a word about Jackal."

Lady Poison freezes. "I _really_ don't have time. Excuse me, I have errands to run, and a client to meet." She tries to push past him, but to her surprise, Ban moves out of her way.

She doesn't look at him. Can't.

The door slams behind her with the snap and click of the lock, and she hurries down the staircase, out the front door of the building. She doesn't turn back.

Someone plays a beat in the air, and Ban is behind her, following down and out the building. He overshadows her with his taller height and build, his body blocking the lamplight as the two of them emerge out into the street. She doesn't stop, striding down the pavement, and he dogs her, eventually falling in step beside her.

"Why do you care, Ban?"

Her voice grates out of her throat, lined with every streak of impatience and anger.

"Because this is Jackal we're dealing with. He's a psychopath, and he's _dangerous_. I don't want you get involved in something that'll end up with you _dead_. I can't _do_ that."

"I'm old enough, Ban. I've learnt how to take care of myself."

"What about Jackal?"

"I'll be fine."

Unexpectedly, his hand reaches out and grabs her from behind. She stumbles, letting him wheel her around, and suddenly, his eyes come with sharp focus into her gaze. The lenses are drawn down the thin, bony bridge his nose, but he is not trying to use his curse.

He wants her to _see_. To _look_.

It takes everything not to flinch in face of the electric intensity and burning fire in his dark blue eyes.

"_Promise_ me, Himiko, you won't do anything stupid."

"I - I promise, Ban," she whispers falteringly. "Let me go,"

His fingers open his iron grip, and Himiko steps back. He is still looking at her, and she returns his gaze, trying to force in silence what she feels. But she doubts he will understand.

_Thank you_, she mouths, before turning sharply, and going on her way.

* * *

Coarse, seedy laughter and the smell of beer and humanity filter out into the evening air as Himiko opens the door to the pub, quickly stepping back out, strapping on the helmet as she does, her throat closed to inhalation.

It had been a wasted trip, and Maguruma was not to be found in those hours she spent in lithium-light listlessness and disgust that rotted her away from inside. She had a client to meet, and stood in the alley outside the pub for a few minutes, leaning against the wall, staring at the sky in an attempt to catch her breath again.

The moon was half-obscured, and in the city, you cannot see the stars. Himiko stares up at the blue-black canvas above her head, but there is no awe, nothing, inside her. An ice sculpture. The seconds tick past in her head.

Five minutes later, she is astride the motorcycle, weaving through the garden maze of Shinjuku to the Honky Tonk again. It is eight-thirty now. The lights are still on, and she doesn't stay for long. She borrows the newspaper, flicking pages, and there.

The name jumps out at her like a savage leopard. _Ishida's Kicthen_. It is a ridiculous name for a high-class restaurant, but while the connoisseur in the newsprint raves and gloats about the quality of food as he is paid to, Himiko is walking out the door.

_Ishida_.

She doubts her own client's name is what he says it is; "Idashi" is an empty name, a badly-done anagram doodled out by him on the corner of a newspaper when he became tired of failing repeatedly at the crossword puzzle.

The address isn't too far, not too much petrol wasted for a schizophrenic, and Himiko does not take more than thirty minutes to bank to a halt outside a two-storey glass and metal building, alight with golden brightness and surrounded by sleek, expensive cars. Lady Poison has no qualms about parking her own miserable little bike in their midst, and she doesn't look twice behind her as she strolls up the steps, slipping into the air-conditioned interior.

"I'm looking for—"

The black-suited manager does not let her finish. His eyes rest on the crimson star staining her coffee-coloured skin, and breaks in heavily. "At the back."

Lady Poison's eyes narrow.

At the very back, she can see a line of shrouded booths and velvet curtains. Only one of the curtains is drawn.

She turns back to the manager, but he is pointedly moving away. She heads towards Idashi, the client.

It is reminiscent of "_The Wizard of Oz_," when Lady Poison twitches the curtain to see the last person she thought she'd see.

"Come in," he says pleasantly. "Sit. If you're looking for Idashi, the guy's not arrived yet."

Wordlessly, she complies. The seating is padded and semi-circular, girdling three-quarters of the table, and she carefully sits at one end, opposite him. The odour of stale, burnt tobacco and cigarette smoke still hangs in the air.

"Are you a chronic?" she blurts suddenly, unable to contain the question.

"'Scuse me?"

"Are you a chronic narcotic?" she repeats.

"You should know by now." He laughs, and she says nothing. They wait in the silence of the night.

It is now beginning to irk her how he insists on calling himself Idashi, how he keeps his voice lowered, and how his dark clothes make him blend so neatly with the background that at times Lady Poison finds herself squinting to make sure she can see him properly.

Idashi is a thoroughly unimpressive man. Short, diminutive, rich and epicanthic eyes that looked Mongolian. His paranoia belied his intelligence.

He wanted them to transport cargo by road to Kawagoe, where a business partner of his would accept the shipment. He was willing to pay a quarter of the fee just then in the restaurant, an additional three hundred yen at the road bridge outside Shinjuku to ensure a turn-up, and the rest after delivery.

"You are, after all," he says, his tone almost apologetic, as Idashi lounges in his seat, "the very best."

Mr. No-Brakes chuckles. There is a lit cigarette held between two of his fingers, and lazy spirals of smoke curl up, poisoning the air.

"There's always Jackal."

"Yes," Idashi stretches that word into a drawl. "I have heard." From his tone, he sounds like he has heard many things— and some of those things, Himiko Kudo knows. "That Lady Poison and Dr. Jackal make good foils for one another. Unfortunately ... Dr. Jackal cannot be reached right now. I have tried."

"I know."

The affirmation sounds uni-vocally. They do not glance at each other.

Himiko does not dare hope she will finally be getting her answers to a question that was not even asked.

* * *

Kuroudo Akabane sits on an empty, undamaged, overturned crate in the cottage, sunlight beating down over his bared head through a break in the cobblestone roof; in front of him, is a cracked mirror.

Kuroudo Akabane is leaning forward on that empty, overturned crate, his hat swept off and lying on the floor, his thumb and index finger of his right hand fitted into the holds of a pair of scissors.

His pale violet eyes stare coldly back at him. His mouth is not smiling.


	6. Scissors, And A Haunting

**Author's Note**: Enough mellowness. Back to being creepy.

If the client, Idashi, gets too incomprehensible, think back to that **Get** **Backers** episode where they first introduced Clayman— think Mr. Honey and Mr. Bee. I didn't model Idashi on them, (especially since one of them was Clayman herself) but it's an easy comparison— fake names and despite the secrecy business, unafraid to show their _real_ faces. (Sort of.)

And I found out I'm on a roll. First in **Chapter Four**— I _love_ randomly inserting creepy cameos.

**heka**, if this is AkabanexHimiko or not, you will definitely find out. They're the main (to emphasize) protagonists, which is why the search filter picked up this story as well. Thanks for the review— both of them. You have nice similies— it made me think of mocha. (I _adore_ coffee.) It was a flattering compliment, about "tension buildup." And as to other writing styles of mine, I promise you they're pretty usual— past tense and present tense only. I felt like being non-conformist, and this was a little overboard when compared to what I had kept in mind.

**Namine-chan13**, wow! I never thought Thanks for what you said about Ban and Himiko's relationship, since it's definitely one of my favourite parts of the anime. And thank you very much for calling this fic "unique"— I'm undignifiedly desperate to be non-conformist. I'm definitely glad you like this story.

**Raving Psychotic**, you'll _definitely_ find what the scissors were for in this chapter. I don't think you'll appreciate it, though. (I mean Akabane was pretty mad in the last chapter when he was doing it, too.) And I certainly agree with you, that a writer deserves to be appreciated— why do you think I'm such a hog when it comes to reviews::grins:: Thanks for excusing the five-floor jump, and definitely nice to know you liked the Himiko-Ban moment.

**omasuoniwabanshi**, not to sound like a cocky braggart, but wow, the "put to silence..." line I don't remember writing, but now, I remember where I got it from. It's from "Julius Caesar," by Shakespeare, Act I (Scene Two?) where the tribunes Flavius and Marullus "have been put to silence for disrobing images of Caesar." (Oops.) "Meat of the scene" is _definitely_ an interesting way of putting it. Thanks for the beautiful compliment though; I'm flattered you'd take off time to read this fic, even if I'm impossibly bad with updates.

**Rabid Lola**, I'm even more flattered. Thanks for the thumbs-up about Himiko's characterization. Um, Mr. No-Brakes didn't _exactly_ turn up out of nowhere. The sequence of the whole chapter went a bit like this: Himiko, and Ban showing up out of nowhere; more Himiko; Himiko at the the restaurant where Mr. No-Brakes _is already waiting_, and then there's a guest appearance by the client. Sorry if I wasn't very clear that it was No-Brakes in the restaurant booth when Himiko arrived. (It was what I meant by the Wizard of Oz reference.)

And as for what Akabane is doing, well, he's not aiming to gross people out, but even _I_ think I _might_ have gone a _little_ overboard with the unnerving tactic I'm having him play out. Even if it will be view unfavorably, I hope you're at least vaguely amused by it.

* * *

**Chapter Six**

The wait is only the hardest part.

The dirty fumes of cigarette smoke fill the cab of the truck, and excusing herself, Lady Poison unbuckles the seatbelt, and getting up as best as the roof allows, lets herself into the back.

She can't stop the jerk that slams up her body like the recoil of shotgun.

Idashi.

Is an unusual client.

"Can I help you with something, Miss Kudo?"

"Not yet; I'm here to check the ropes." At the back of her mind, she wonders what contagious bout of insanity had infected her and Mr. No-Brakes to allow themselves to be paid a paltry packet of three thousand yen each, before what promises to be a night of no sleep, no dreams. And of course, to also allow Idashi to ride with them in the back of the truck.

Then she thinks, the shock comes not from that, but from the way he's sitting. Knees pulled up, starched black suit. Her heart thuds in her throat.

So familiar.

For five hours, they have been driving at lowered speed; Idashi's paranoia has not left Mr. No-Brakes with semblance of sanity. After all, the client, and not God, is the king. Be he, or be he not (she insists) schizophrenic.

She gingerly moves past him, towards two large crates strapped down with chains. They rattle as the truck bounces harshly over the potholes and the bends, and she remembers how Mr. No-Brakes had told her, earlier that evening, there was a transporter of sorts who used to ensure the delicate cargo didn't break by literally nailing the holding boxes to the ground.

Idashi's eyes follow her, and she feels like the touch of cold fish against her bare arms, and she quietly swallows. She checks the two crates, testing the chains, for she is more sinewy than her appearances indicate (not as much as Ban Mido, perhaps ... there. There creeps in his name again, like some kind of illusion of safety.)

There is no way to look out into the road, the same gravel and chip ground she has watched flash past her eyes, landmarked with half-bare trees bending eerily in the wind and stars in the sky that follow them wherever they go. Stars foretell the future, what is to come after tomorrow ... Himiko can see herself in the same place, a constant like the Star of David. A constant reminder of something that was.

_Be alive, Himiko_. _You are not dead yet_.

Funnily enough, it is the slimy touch of Idashi's epicanthic eyes at the back of neck that jolts her back to reality, from the cesspool-like depths of pseudo-philosophising.

She turns around, and returns to the bucket seats up front, sharply veering away from the client. She literally hops beside Maguruma, and turns on the stereo. He glances, amused, at her out of the corner of his eye, as she fumbles with the stack of CDs. He calmly extracts Schubert from the top of the pile and hands it to her in the universal gesture of _Just stick it in, and be happy, will you_?

Jabbing PLAY, the Unfinished symphony, spills out. As the music first starts to flow, she barely listens, taken in and unimpressed by how drolly it moves, her cheek pressing against the rolled-up window pane, and she never realizes it when the sinister, sinuous streams flow around her, trapping her.

* * *

She doesn't realize it either, when she drifts asleep. A hand brushing against her — the lightest casual touch — grabs her by the ankle and gives a jerk.

"_What_!"

Himiko turns her head blearily to see Mr. No-Brakes, one eye on the road, grinning at her. There is something in her lap, and it looks like a wrap. A misshapen jacket. He too is wearing one with an oversized collar.

"What the hell is this?"

He nods at the windshield. "Road block ahead. It's pouring, and there's not a clean-up crew in sight."

"Crap." She unrolls the window pane, flecks of rain hitting her like wayward spittle. Drawing the jacket up over her head, she peers out. She cannot see much — like this is a waking dream — but black shadows loom out of nowhere. It is cold, too, and she rubs her arms through her sleeves.

She glances at the CD-player. Franz Schubert is still dictating, and before her mind can identify the piece, she reaches over and firmly cuts the music off. Peering into the rear view mirror, Idashi is as she had left him— hands on his drawn-up knees, head resting on that. It was a marvel how he was not rocking like the truck, a frighteningly conspicuous, black bundle.

If he were a painting, she can see the titling already: _The Grim Reaper's Hound_.

The truck is slowing down. The wheels don't spin fast and furiously, and the rain hammering down on the roof and hood, echoes a little louder in the silent, gloom-infusing metal encasement of inside. They roll to a slow halt, the engine killed.

"Chop, chop. Time's-a-wasting."

Lady Poison arches an eyebrow, unlocking the door and dismounting, pulling on the jacket as she does. "Stay seated, please," she calls out to Idashi, surprised at how loud her voice must be to transcend the wind.

_The wind, howling and shrieking, as it breaks through the air, spiralling down, down, down, past their ears, down past the slope of the hills, down the freeway, down through the earth, down, down, further, into hell_.

Himiko shudders. It ripples up her skin like a near-pleasant sensation. The air feels cold as it whips past her. For a moment, an everlasting moment, it feels like there had been someone behind her. Whispering. Lips moving beside her ear. Hot breath grazing her cheek like a razor.

Mr. No-Brakes appears out of the invisible envelope of air. He is carrying a rod-like bundle in his hands, that he obtained from the back of the truck. His large, dishpan-like hand, claps her hard on the shoulder. She glances up. "_Chop-chop_," he mouths.

* * *

Kuroudo Akabane sweeps through the streets, the puddles in the gutters turned brackish from the rains. But no one looks. No one turns around to see him. Not a single wayward glance, no curiosity. At last, to them, he is just another man.

The brim of his hat plays with the shadows moving across his face. Thin face. Cold eyes. Thin mouth. Cropped hair.

He does not have a coat, only a white shirt and creased black trousers. He looks like another man with a hat to shade his precious complexion from the sun. His hands are gloved. The palms of the gloves are slowly staining red. The shirt has a crisp, newly-washed look to it. To wash away the bloodstains.

Dr. Jackal has no more use for his scissors. They are lost in someone else's garbage bin, far away from his little cottage. Garbologists will certainly wonder what those people were doing throwing out blood-stained scissors, but he cannot even laugh.

* * *

Lady Poison leans over in the driver's seat, wiping at the windshield with her own bare hand. Rain slides down the double glass, leaving a slippery trail, like a snake slithering in a marsh, a thin trail of mud left behind it on the water. She can barely see through it, like it _is_ mud.

The road is blocked, certainly, by a triggered landslide— Mr. No-Brakes tells her, shouting next to her ear over the wind, that there is a construction site nearby. He also tells her, making her re-enforce that belief that he is a fool sometimes, that he miscalculated the distance. The truck is parked too close to the block, and if he dares light the bundle of dynamite, he risks blowing their engine into oblivion.

Privately, Himiko Kudo shall not mind. There is a great many things on earth she feels no attachment to.

Mr. No-Brakes refuses to share those sentiments, and outnumbered in self-absorbing apathy, Lady Poison is forced behind the wheel, wondering how she should be able to reverse a truck when she cannot see behind her— the tiny rear-view mirror next to the window is caked with filth from above.

"_Then do _you_ want to do the ka-boom honours_?" the echo of Maguruma's voice growls.

"_No thanks_; _I don't want to risk ka-booming _you."

_Turn the key_, _Himiko_. _Wait for the engine_. _Just because you drive spindly two-wheelers around the streets doesn't mean you can't handle this_. Yamato would know what to do, she thinks, and if he were alive (she feels like she's daring herself with that _if_) he'd know that this was the lonely road to her own destruction.

A bulky shape she supposes is Mr. No-Brakes looms out through the windshield, angrily gesticulating, and she swallows, bringing her foot down on the gas pedal, one hand on the gearshift.

The truck rocks on its wheels, slowly rolling backwards.

Mr. No-Brakes's hands are still motioning for her to move backwards, and she gingerly backs up another few metres. _More_! he orders.

There is a bend in the road — her memory, more than her sixth sense, informs her of it — and she gently spins the steering, trying to negotiate a safe passage with the gravel and tar bend. A trickle of sweat, colder than melted ice, runs down the side of Lady Poison's neck. Her breathing comes out like a hunted stag's, cold, fast and shallow.

_Someone's hands, soft, smooth, are pressed over hers_.

The dynamite explosion bursts in her deaf ears.

Mr. No-Brakes appears by her window, the rain running icily down the back of his collar. His hair is plastered over his head, and he's grinning. "Back on the road."

Numbly, Lady Poison switches seats to the passenger side. She deliberately turns her head to look out the window, empty blackness that makes her very close to fear.

"Hey. _Himiko_. All right there?"

"I'm fine," she snaps.

The hands folded tightly in Lady Poison's lap, are shaking.

* * *

His shoes click angrily on the pavement, beating a rhythm only he seems to comprehend, and the evening is lit by lamp-posts, that only illuminate how he does not belong in this sprawling part of Shinjuku, away from the residential parts, in this separated realm of the wealthy and rich. Kuroudo Akabane blows into the boulevard opposite the hospital complex, a darkly queer figure standing behind the pool of a street-lamp, hat pulled low even when there is no sun.

Those uncontemplative, uncaring, unmasked violet eyes are silently swallowing the sight of the hospital.

When he walks through its revolving doors, the heels clicking angrily on the smooth, water-like marble tiles, the fluorescent lighting harsh overhead, and the reception lobby freed of the smell of disinfectant— it is not be the first time he experiences that tingle of shock and apprehension that jolts up him like that.

Dr. Jackal has most certainly been here before.

When he first drew his scalpels into himself, he sat on a bench in the park, exaggerating the damage tolled on his wickedly frail-sinewy body. It was only an excuse for him to come here.

Now, he has done the same thing.

The blood-stained scissors, meant to puzzle the garbologists, is certainly proof of that.


	7. Of Scissors, Scalpels and Plates

**Author's Note**: I'm _extremely_ sorry for taking so long, but writer's block is as bad as "Mr. Pneumonia"— even if I have everything chalked out, it takes a year to write it out. To make up for it, it's a comparatively long chapter.

I also think it's high time to put in a bit of sadism alert. **I warn you, what Akabane's been upto is not pretty**.

There's been a small-but-drastic-to-the-plot kind of change made to **Chapter Four**. I hadn't realized I'd made the mistake to start with, so anyway. The tiny-but-freakily-important alteration has been made to **the first line of the last part** (in case, anyone's interested.)

Also, my unending indebtedness to for pointing it out about the paycheck. I've corrected it, and Himiko and No-Brakes are officially being paid a preliminary **three thousand yen **for the job by Idashi, instead of three **hundred**.

**omasuoniwabanshi**, you raised an interesting question. Hmm ... _will_ Himiko ever see Akabane again? If they're star-crossed lovers, then it's highly unlikely ... and I'm not kidding, too. Thanks for what you said about the imagery, too!! (Idashi ... well, let's just say, he _lives_ to creep.) Akabane and the doctor— you'll love it. (Or there's also a chance that you might not, since I warn you it's a _little_ sadistic.) Actually, I should leave you to decide— you'll find out very soon.

**Aquarius** **Galuxy**, ooh, cute pseudonym. Thanks for the compliment! My usual writing style (if I even have one,) is pretty banal, and extremely inconsistent (a perfect reflection of myself, but that's something I like glossing over) so, the comment a vote of confidence. What did Akabane do to himself? Well, he was certainly playing with sharp objects (scissors, in this case), but if you didn't get the "deeper significance," it's all right. It's meant to be cryptic, and it'll be a mystery cleared up sooner than you think.

**Skavnema**, thanks! Nice to know you like this fic!

, I'm glad you like this story. Wow, thanks for pointing it out— boy, do I feel stupid or what. And thanks for the extra tip for reckoning the value of a yen; I may be a complete dud when it comes to foreign currency, but the dollar is definitely familiar. (And hey, I'm a big girl, not to be confused with the big bad wolf and I don't take offense so easily, unless it's a flame. I appreciate criticism, and each time someone points out a discrepancy in what I write, my immediate reaction is either to laugh, or to squirm in embarrassment. The one you pointed out made my jaw drop— ouch, I couldn't imagine Lady Poison of all people risking a night-time jaunt with Asmodeus for only a paltry three U.S. dollars!)

* * *

**Chapter Seven**

At ten-past in the night, the upper floors of the hospital are flooded with fluorescent light. Doctors are not men; they are not allowed to sleep. The polished-tile floors glisten like water, and the walls look damp from the rain. The doors are all closed, and the orderlies serenely wheel trolleys past like ghosts.

"Akabane, Akabane..."

Dr. Jackal snaps irritably, "What is that? A hymn to call upon my good blessings?"

"You're a fool. A walking, reckless fool..."

The breeze rushed through the only open window on the fourth floor. A man is ordinarily not allowed to get away with something as shamelessly rude as that, but Akabane's eyes and ears are closed tonight. _He cannot afford to keep them open here_.

"— _And_ you're a bloody masochist."

Dr. Jackal's eyes flutter open.

"I make house-calls; you have my number. Taking a knife to yourself..." The doctor shakes his head in immeasurable disgust— and Akabane marvels at how far this man is willing to test his endurance.

"It was a pair of _scissors_. Don't be so utterly facetious, Dr. Suzuki. It's unbecoming of those three PhDs. You know very well I can't afford to let you know where I am. Only my agents know that, and only my agents know not to divulge that. And in the meanwhile, you know that I need your help. Can we get to that part please, without this idle chit-chat?"

The doctor smiles. "What about idle anaesthetic? ... Lie down, if you'll be so obliging. And take that shirt off, without your blue-stocking modesty. I'm a doctor— not Superman. I only get to use X-ray vision with the help of my equipment."

The lighting is good on this floor, and the tube-lights flood the room with white. No murky darkness, no flickering shadows. Except for the colour of the sky, day and night looks just the same in here, truly, honestly, far from sinister, ushering a sense of safety. Akabane knows better than to be lulled to sleep by the amount of light in the room. This doctor ... he smiles. Perhaps a more intelligent man than Dr. Suzuki had never lived.

Sliding out of his shoes, he swings up his legs and lies back on the bed shoved into one corner of the room. He stretches a bit like a drowsy cat trying to awake, pulls up his knees, and yanks the starched-crisp shirt off. He picks up his bare hands, and admires the epics written in his scars. He can hear the doctor fiddling about somewhere else, clink, clink, and the sound of metal tapping against ceramic.

When was the last time he'd been here? It seems so long ago — almost a lifetime, literally — because the Kuroudo Akabane who had come here then, resembled nothing of the Dr. Jackal now. Not even in face.

Two separate worlds colliding into one single body.

He smiles slowly. It reflects in the mirror slanted above Dr. Suzuki's table, and he sees it. Dr. Suzuki smiles back.

* * *

Dawn is beginning to split the clouds open when they finally leave Shinjuku.

Lady Poison is asleep, legs pulled up under her in the front bucket seat, the misshapen jacket wrapped around her since the last night. Idashi, certainly, is awake, hunched up in the same jarring imitation of Dr. Jackal.

Apathetically, Mr. No-Brakes stares out the windshield, the scenery stripping past him on the mud-splattered roads. Some days, each job melts and rolls like tar into the other, but Idashi makes it all different. Maguruma is infinitely glad this client is rich. Maybe the paycheck for this one will make up for the sheer anarchy of the last one.

(And the Get Backers hadn't even been involved.)

At about nine in the morning, Mr. No-Brakes is extorted into doing what refuses point-blank to do: halt.

They're precariously low on gas, like a gremlin has been sitting on the fuel tank under the hood all night, sipping the oil through a straw, because Maguruma is a practical man and knows practical means to live up to his epithet. At nine in the morning, he pulls into the first gas-station he sees.

Lady Poison is beginning to stir, waking up to the sensation of being cloaked in a stranger's jacket with its smell of nicotine, annoyed at being _indulged_ like this. "Anyone for breakfast?" she murmurs, stretching her lean, cramped legs, running a hand through her hair, anything to look casual under the scrutiny of the dull-looking station-boy who comes to give them a re-fill.

Maguruma fiddles with his wallet, reluctant to part with the crisp bills, when he knows he started with a full tankard the previous night.

"Is anybody ready for breakfast?"

Even half-awake, Himiko's face twists into a grimace. Idashi's voice is not one people like to wake up to in the mornings, and Maguruma is of little help, casting her an exemplary, thoroughly unsympathetic _Oh, dunk it in a sewage tank, for all I care_ look. Perhaps the noose tightening around his wallet is sapping him of all camaraderie, but he sits stolidly in his seat anyway, leaving Himiko to turn around to deal with Idashi.

"It's too early for breakfast," she says politely, but it is brushed aside.

* * *

Thrown back out in the streets, Akabane feels like a man reborn out of the flames of Hell— or even a man who is thirsty and hungry for breakfast. Pulling on his gloves over his stinging, sore hands as he leaves the hospital, he sees a small roadside snack-shop propped up opportunistically close to the medical facility.

From the uneducated viewpoint, it appears to be empty, but jackals see in the light and dark.

His shoes click on the pavement, his knuckles lightly rap the counter of the small shop, its main entrance shut. He waits patiently for the fuzzy grey head to slow emerge, for he knows there are not too many places where he can find his share of grub, and this will have to do.

By the blinding sight of the sun climbing in the sky, it seems to be past ten. A night and almost half a day without food— he feels like he can grind Dr. Suzuki's skull between his jaws, but men are known to be beasts, and there is no point in rubbing it in. He forcibly distracts himself.

Since the last night, he feels like a dog as well as his own master; a dog impatient for a walk, its master struggling with his grip on the leash. For every paltry inconvenience he takes so much pride in causing, Suzuki is a useful man to know.

_He needs to go somewhere_. _To be alone_. _To_ think.

The sunlight beats down on his hat, whitewashing the ghastly figure of Dr. Jackal, bleaching the black with a greyish tinge. The shop-keeper is not vaguely intimidated as he pushes a bowl of noodles at Akabane over the counter, a paw landing over the coins the strange customer has left.

Without a bench under him, Akabane strolls away, carrying a cold bowl of stale noodles he is certain he has overpaid for.

* * *

"Close," Mr. No-Brakes murmurs, and the relief in his voice is shamefully transparent.

Leaning out the window, Lady Poison glimpses the milestone at the edge of the road. At Idashi's dictated speed limit, they are moving too slow for the evening wind to sweep past her, as the truck rolls like tortoise on rusty wheels. Only because a cad would laugh in thankful glee, she doesn't.

Not quite sunset, and with her soaring spirits, she waits for the most beautiful sight under the sky.

"Maguruma,"

"_What_."

Evidently not a conversationalist, she thinks, tut-tutting, but sallies on nonetheless. The driver is staring stolidly out the windshield, and she drops her voice like Rapunzel in the tower with her prince, even though the witch is nearby, and says,

"When was the last time you saw Jackal?"

"Heh? What kind of question is that?"

In the simple discourtesy of not bothering to turn his head, Himiko sees plainly the man has everything to hide.

"It was day-before-yesterday, wasn't it? The two of you had a job to do."

She sees his throat move. If she moves any closer to him in the bucket seat, she knows she will hear the jerky heartbeat pounding in his chest. "You're breathing too fast," she says very softly. "It's because I'm _right_, isn't it..."

"'Course not,"

His nicotine-ruined voice nearly croaks when he defends himself, as Lady Poison can see, with a lie. Then he says,

"It was the day before the day-before-yesterday."

At last, Himiko lets herself laugh.

"He told me it was a job gone wrong. Why don't you tell me the rest?" She doesn't try to cajole it out; she simply adds: "It slashed his pride to shreds, but it's not a secret anymore."

"A job gone wrong?" Mr. No-Brakes mars the quote with a snort. "That's one way of putting a disaster. All I know is that we were nearly skinned, but I shot off with the cargo, and he left himself behind."

"The Get Backers weren't involved, were they?"

Maguruma reproduces a gun-shot.

"So, who were you running from?"

Eyes stolidly attached to the windshield with strong adhesive. White bandana wrapped around temples beneath matted hair, that nearly obscures those inscrutable eyes. Black and unresponsive. There is something hard in the set of the mouth, something granitic in that flat voice that says,

"Have you heard the name Asmodeus?"

Lady Poison slowly shakes her head. He tells her nothing more, and she knows she must let the string drop there, because she knows nothing in connection to that name.

Nothing, save unhelpful rumours of fear.

* * *

There are a lot of adjectives to be used when you puncture yourself: grisly and masochistic, being some of the more appropriate (often apt) ones.

For some reason, "ulterior motive" is strangely never used.

Unfortunately, that is the only description Akabane feels he can use to suit his situation. He has not been driven off the edge far enough; he's still standing on the cliff, his toes white as they clench the precipice.

Balancing the bowl of noodles on one hand, he sits on a park bench, a dirty, unkempt park it is, with old plastic bags furtively stowed behind bushes like corpses. He is alone, although he can't be sure; for the past one-twelfth of an hour, he has begun to suspect there is someone stowed away on the ancient beech tree.

_Focus_.

Grudgingly, grumblingly, his mind is dragged back to the matter at hand.

How many years ago was it, that he first met Suzuki? ... He can't remember, and gives it up as fruitless. He barely remembers his age, but he must have crossed the threshold of puberty. He can't picture Dr. Jackal ever being seven years old, so he suspects he must have been teenaged, then. Perhaps seventeen.

Whatever it was, he remembers learning how to wield his scalpels, or more importantly, he remembers learning to manipulate the ethereal magnetic force of his that allowed him to withdraw those scalpels into his body.

He certainly remembers the blood. The sea in which he'd nearly drowned, until he lost his footing and fell— straight into the blackness. And then the painful moment of waking up, wracked with the agony he'd been too awed to feel before. He remembers a man in a white coat kneeling over him, a wad of gauze and bandages in his hand.

The doctor had called out to an orderly — that part he clearly remembers, because then he'd thought it funny and tried to laugh, and laughed even harder when he discovered he somehow had the strength to. The doctor had said: "Oi, you. Fetch me more bandages, I'm nearly all out."

There had been no more bandages, and the assistant had gone to get them. The memory is hazy in Akabane's mind: he only remembers the doctor's face, the way his lips moved, his eyes gleamed. He cannot recall where he lay, when it happened. Nothing.

He remembers the doctor saying, "You're an experimental young man, aren't you? ... I've seen the supernatural myself, and your excellent recovery is one of those occurrences."

The doctor had left him a little present. Something that left the pain searing through Akabane's arm.

It had been a scalpel. An ungainly, unshapely surgeon's scalpel most unlike what Dr. Jackal uses. But it had been inscribed with something.

Akabane can't remember what it says. It had broken a long time ago, and he had thrown it away. But for some reason, he felt like he should know what it had told him.

It was the scalpel that left the scar on the inside of his palm.

The previous night, he'd done the same thing. Reliving a memory. The scissors had been painful, but what does a man with purpose care for pain? He cut himself expressly to be able to visit Dr. Suzuki.

Even if a man with purpose cannot be bothered with pain, the receptionist at a hospital will refuse to entertain a perfectly healthy man. Akabane had needed an injury, and had found one.

The end certainly justifies his means. He is now carrying under his skin, one of his own scalpels which has been inscribed with tiny, grains of lettering.

Because Suzuki is the doctor he met on the night Dr. Jackal was born, and Suzuki is the only man who faced Asmodeus and survived.

* * *

The palm tree sways in the nightly wind, the leaves crackling as they brush against one another, casting wild, disfigured shadows across the ground, over the roof of the truck and through the window, across Himiko's lap. She unbuckles the seatbelt, opening the door, and slides out.

The hotel is one reserved for the paying élite, and the golden lights spill through the tall glass windows. A cocktail party on the roof, and guests lean over the railing. Himiko forces herself not to care, but it is difficult not to notice the difference between them, elegantly dressed, bejewelled, and her, in close-fitting clothes that are not meant to impress but convenience, bought with thrift.

The twilit shadows falls over them, under their feet, the air cold, a looming presence leaning over a shoulder.

Moving towards the back of the truck, Mr. No-Brakes unlocks it, opening it. They are in Kawagoe — Idashi has handed them their bulky envelopes — they will be rid of him.

"Help me unload these crates."

For a minute, they struggle, a tankard of a man and a sinewy teenager leaping inside the truck, and Idashi stands to the side, hands clasped behind his back, watching, coldly watching...

The first piece of cargo lands on the ground with a hard thud. Idashi's nondescript features flicker into a nondescript grimace, and from the back of the truck, Lady Poison laughs,

"Hey, careful! If we damage it, it gets docked from the pay."

Mr. No-Brakes grins, lifted by the same buoyancy. "Shall we open it to check?" He casts a sideward glance at Idashi, who looks uncertain, giving an uncertain nod. "Got a crowbar?"

"I saw one in the back."

The shudder leaps across Himiko's spine like an angry wildcat at the sound of Idashi's voice. Never to be heard again.

She complies, fetching the implement, and between her and her colleague, they pry the lid open.

Padded with hay, it is stacked with unmarked crockery. At least, that is what they've been told. The planks of the wooden lid come loose, one nail bending, then the other.

Maguruma is the first to see it, the edge of a porcelain plate, bordered with an elaborate wreath of painted foxgloves, and even with all the machismo stripped away from him, he cannot help the shiver tingling under the tips of his fingers, as he reaches out to touch the plate.

"What — what _is_ that?"

Himiko is ashamed of the way her voice quivers, but fear has nestled against her side since the last night. Her pulse hammers against her skin, and she stares at Maguruma, unable to look at Idashi ever again.

The man's protuberant fish-like eyes are nearly out of his head.

Mr. No-Brakes withdraws his hand, and under the moonlight, they all see it. The voices from the cocktail party float down from above, like ghosts riding on cherry petals as they fall from the heavens.

The crockery is covered with some inexplicable black, oily substance that sure as hell was never there before.


	8. Ignorance Is A Haven

**Author's Note**::stomps around like Godzilla, pouting:: Hey, is _no one_ going to tell me what they thought of Jackal and his Scissors of Doom?

I really should apologize for posting this so late, but I kept re-writing this chapter. I'm still not entirely satisfied, since there's something clearly missing from the writing, making a little sub-standard. Honestly, I'd appreciate it a lot if you could point out where there's room for improvement or what I should focus/cut back on.

To make up for the wait, I've made it longer than usual.

::thwacks self:: **Aquarius Galuxy**, I owe you for pointing out some of the most measly errors I've ever made in my life (guess there _is_ something to The Importance Of Being InTheHabitOfEditing.) Thanks for what you said about the metaphors. Wow! Sharp guessing! (I shamelessly can't resist adding to Asmodeus's creep of a reputation.) Nice to heat you like Suzuki— most people seem to be prejudiced the wrong way when it comes to OCs.

**Skavnema**, thanks! I hope you like this chapter as well. Thanks a lot for reading _and_ putting up with the horribly slow updates.

**omasuoniwabanshi**, I don't know any medical students, personally, but I felt like making Suzuki feel like being cynical-sardonic (what can I say, that stuff's fun!) Wow! And you liked him?— usually people have this natural adversity to too many important OCs. Thanks for pointing it out about "the bidding;" you certainly have a point, and I've patched it up. I'm glad you like Akabane's characterization. For some reason I'm hell-bent on making him look like an evil prig, in contrast to the vaguely-human guy I like to read about in fanfiction. Glad you liked Mr. No-Brakes, too — I got fed up of seeing him as so _one_-dimensional — but what you said about him made my day. I've never seen the X-files, but I've read a lot of references to it in modern fiction, so a comparison— wow! I really am flattered. It certainly was a scrutinizing review— thanks ever so much!

**NightOwl360**, thank you for the flattering compliment, especially since this writing style's purely experimental. I definitely have my fingers crossed in hope I'm able to retain your interest.

* * *

**Chapter Eight**

Idashi is dead.

It comes from the phone call, one wild dusk-lit evening when the wind howls restlessly through the streets, and Himiko stands in the bathroom, one hand on the taps, debating if she should have another bath. And the phone rings, shrill and clanging through the empty (perhaps lonely on nights like this) flat, and she rushes to answer.

Of course, it is Hevn — who else? — and not the black-attired man she is hoping for.

"Himiko? Is it you?"

"Do you have a job?" Some days, work is all she has left, or rather, all she wants to keep.

"Not yet, honey, but I have a bit of news about the last job you _did_."

Idashi— the name leaps into her mind like her heart crashes into her throat, as Hevn says,

"See, the client you had — he's _dead_."

The wind thrashes the branches of the tree against the drawing room window— from which Dr. Jackal had leapt into oblivion and obscurity. Two nights ago. In only two days — simply forty-eight hours — Himiko is aging from a teenager trying to meet the end-of-the-month bills, to a girl afraid for her life.

"Himiko? ... Himiko? Are you still there?"

Softly, slowly, uncertainly almost,

"This is me."

"You sound so different, all of a sudden."

_Not suddenly at all_, she thinks, shaking her head slowly from side to side in near-petrifying horror. _Not at all _... She carefully replaces the phone on the cradle with a miserable click.

* * *

The library is ancient and drafty, the wind whipping past the creaks and cracks of the doors and windows, howling and ricocheting through the empty reading room. The fluorescent lights blink myopically, and a hunched figure seated on a bench reads alone.

When Akabane pushes open the door, that is all he sees.

It reminds him of himself in his teens, lanky, snake-like, pale from the hours shut in dusty libraries no one visits anymore, reading, absorbing, tongue rolling in his mouth, not quite able to grasp the taste of power. Only nights afterwards, he had done the unthinkable and crossed the line tearing apart the scholar and the doer, a night of blurred memory and pain when Dr. Jackal was born.

Akabane likes to put things dramatically, especially when no one is listening, and standing in the present, thinks history is repeating itself like a broken radio.

The other reader doesn't care to look up, but can hear Akabane as he swishes through the dusty aisles, can hear his gloved fingertips running down leather-bound spines. And Dr. Jackal can _see_ with some sort of inner eye he wishes he could use all the time, the reader hunched like scrunched a paper ball over the tome laid open on the table, spidery hands lying flat on the pages.

But what the inner eye cannot explain to him is why he feels like those spidery hands are caressing _his_ spine, gingerly feeling every bone of his vertebral column.

But indeed, what does _he_ know? He is merely a man displaced, still floundering in a sea of emotion (panic and fear) he has never felt before. The hunched-up reader with the horrible hands almost _pities_ him. Dr. Jackal has been beaten and wrung out like laundry in a washing machine. He is drowning, and cannot feel his surroundings with a jackal's senses.

Because _if_ he could — but he doesn't — he would have realised he is in a most unfrequented corner of Shinjuku, and separated from him by merely a ceiling-high two-sided shelf of dusty books no one reads, is Asmodeus.

* * *

Hevn is not given to checking her make-up in the large vanity mirror in the middle of her cramped bedroom. She keeps it filled with so many mementos, that there often isn't enough space to move about and to examine the emergence of creases in the mirror, something that she's been suspicious of since she crossed thirty.

She wades knee-deep in the swamp of her discarded clothes and scattered audio tapes, scuba-diving in the shallower depths of her closet, her cell-phone precariously balanced between her shoulder and her ear.

"What do you mean he won't see me?" she snapped. "He's a grown man, not a thirteen-year-old!"

The voice on the other line, crackly with static and apologetic, is that of the newly appointed police commissioner's front-desk secretary, trying to explain his boss's ego after being jilted. Hevn is not amused, hopping as she pulls on a pair of shoes.

Twirling her car-keys (a rare luxury since the petrol prices seem to be rising faster than spirals of steam from a mug of diet-indulgent, afternoon hot chocolate) she's still on the phone, fifteen minutes later, as she walks down the pavement, head tilted as she scans the roadside for the rendezvous point, amid the terrible evening weather.

Within those fifteen minutes, she has switched callers from the secretary to Himiko Kudo, currently engaged in a battle of wit and words with the latter as she argues she has found the right street, but the right restaurant is wrongfully missing. Almost all she can do, is keep herself from stamping her foot and screaming like a brat.

* * *

"I'm sorry, honey, I have no idea of what you're telling me."

Lady Poison is tired of being treated like a child.

Like she's poor, little Himiko shoved into a glass bubble clouded from inside, dogged by a past she can't let go of, trying to do a man's job to prove her worth and that she's capable, consorting with the fiends of the underworld to show off her professionalism, and going home at the end of the day to peel off the mask and live out her miserable little existence.

Not that she's not denying that's a lie.

She tries not to call it wallowing, but contemplation, because what she can't deny is that she's depressed nd frightened. When her waking thoughts are not of Akabane and his safety, they turn to the only thing she seems to have left anymore: her losses.

But when someone like Hevn who sees the supernatural, arches an eyebrow and offers to be sympathetic instead of helpful, it's like a live electric wire threading through her blood stream, electrocuting her from within.

"Haven't you wondered what's happened to Akabane? As in, why he's suddenly disappeared."

"Akabane? ... No, not really. I haven't had much use for him lately, and guys like Shido, and Ban and Ginji generally get the job done. Why? Am I _supposed_ to be concerned about it?"

"He's missing, Hevn."

"Oh?" Her eyebrows rose politely. "Sorry, but Akabane's never been the type to show me his vacation schedule, so I can't always judge if he's missing or holidaying." Her voice is like gin, and bitterness is the mixer.

"What's happened to you?" Himiko wants to talk about her woes and shortcomings in life, not her agent's. She doesn't have that link Ban and Ginji do with people they meet; she's lost the ones she loved, now she's given up on love. She doesn't love Hevn, and doesn't want to.

(The voice at the back of her head whispers cattily, _She doesn't love Akabane, and she doesn't want to_.)

"I'm crossing over to the ugly side of thirty, darling; I'm an embittered old spinster, so humour me." Hevn snaps her fingers imperiously at a passing waitress, asking for their first cup of coffee. "Mocha," she says, "with lots of brown sugar."

Himiko's fingers are beating a devil's tattoo on the plastic tabletop, her face wiped blank like the windshield of Hevn's new car. She sighs with the theatrical grace of the _old_, wise woman facing the young.

"All right, I'll bite. _What_ about Akabane?"

Himiko bites her lip, and Hevn's has to bite her own to keep herself from shouting, "_Don't_! _You'll ruin your mouth_!" Hevn is the only one between them who needs to follow that, and Himiko is a teenager. Lines are blurring for Hevn, and she's willing to sell her soul to trade places.

"He's on the run, being hunted by a blood-lusting whacko who's the brand new Evil in town."

Himiko has to marvel at the plastic, affected sheen she is putting around her bete noire, and Hevn's eyebrows will probably never be lowered. She elaborates, and the words won't stop pouring. She talks and talks about Kuroudo Akabane whom she rarely calls by that given name, about the sensed presence of invisible strangers, about Mr. No-Brakes who knows what she's wants to know but cannot help all the same, about Ban who she's proud to ask, and finally, not about Asmodeus, but lurking fear.

Thrice. Thrice she's been thrown against this mysterious rumour of fear. For the first time on the night that Dr. Jackal fled, then on the job for Idashi, and finally on the night they unloaded their cargo— _backtrack_.

Pause. Rewind. Play. Pause.

Replay.

Slim brown fingers that are sure to leave a red imprint on Hevn's skin once they let go of her arm— _if_ they let go. A voice, breaking into pieces like she's on the phone, being interfered with by static. Slow and quivering.

"Hevn — Hevn — Asmodeus — he — she — _killed_ — murdered Idashi."

Silence.

Trembles racking up and down, hugging her, shaking her with all the violence it can muster. "Hevn — don't — don't you believe me? This Asmodeus person _used_ Idashi — he's — she's — _after me_."

Amber-ringed pupils reflecting Himiko half-falling over a plastic tabletop, face paler than a ghost's. Suddenly impossible to tell if it's blankness or contemplation.

Slowly, half-shamefully, Himiko slides back into her seat. Her skin is glowing hotly with embarrassment. Even to her own ears, she sounds like she's going too far. What had she said?

..._ Being hunted by a blood-lusting whacko who's the brand new Evil in town_.

That sums it up nicely. Who's there to believe her? Maguruma — who won't look her in the eye, and never has? Akabane — who won't surface in the world of men because it will get him killed? Ban — who's cursed like she is but doesn't know?

What was that cliché she used to love to text to her friends every time after she got a cell phone? "_When you cry_, _you cry alone_..." In those days, it was still her and Yamato, hungry and poor doing retrieval jobs to buy bread, and her friends came from the same circle of society — from the same "the ring of fire" was what her beloved brother used to call it.

She was crying, and she was alone.

Hevn says slowly, and Himiko doesn't look up, not caring to hear what hollow comfort and reassurance is sure to be offered.

"You know ... your client wasn't killed in any mysterious circumstances. He was killed in a gangland execution on the outskirts of town, and his name wasn't Idashi. It was Hans Shangkun. Half blooded, half German, half Chinese. Arms dealer working on the side for a Yakuza kingpin. Apparently, he was a mercenary and he and he got a fatter pay-packet. Unfortunately the Yakuza powers-that-be found out, and there you have it ... Co-incidence his death, because it was all a very public business."

"... Oh."

Himiko is looking at her rather oddly.

"What? Do I have acne? — Actually I don't mind, if it means I'm biologically backtracking into teenage."

Something strikes Himiko. Her hands fly up, clamping over her mouth.

"_It was engine oil_!"

"Sorry?"

Himiko shakes her head, saying, fast and furiously, only half to herself, "One the road — Maguruma was complaining he'd run out of petrol unexpectedly — he was complaining about how much petrol cost. Then when we arrived — at our destination, with Idashi's cargo, there was ugly black fluid in it. Engine oil!"

It is Hevn's turn to shake her head, as she slowly digests what she is being told.

"But why?"

"To scare me off, I think," says Himiko softly, staring at the plastic tabletop now. "Asmodeus is after Jackal. But the night he fled, Asmodeus was at my door. Maybe this is a warning, to stay away."

Hevn says dryly, "Is it working?"

A shamefaced smile, tilted. "Yes."

"Lady Poison is growing sense, I see."

"Not at all. I'm not after Asmodeus— I'd be risking my life that way. I said I'd help _Akabane_— and that's what I won't stop doing."

"You need to have some clue of where he is, first."

Even without being the proverbial bad guy, Hevn is pushing in seeds of doubt through Himiko's ears. "Is he even in Shinjuku?"

The lightbulb blinks and falters before shining.

"The police commissioner's my ex-boyfriend, if that helps matters."

"_How_?" All Himiko sees is Hevn bragging about her magnetism, that lures the higher-ups of society.

"Because I don't think Jackal's skipped town. He's not the type to run away, and keep running. He's lurking in Shinjuku, and probably strengthening his arsenal. And if he's _in_ town, someone must have seen him ... All right, not the respectable class, but the police have webs in the city. Somebody's bound to have seen someone liked Jackal, even if they don't realize the significance."

* * *

Tripping over her own wedge-heeled shoes in silent fury, Hevn storms down the pavement, her palms stinging and red. _Men are babies_. There are no tears at the corners of her eyes. _Men are babies_.

All she knows is: the library.

Overhead, the light is fading. Twilight dying and night is falling. Like a curtain descending over the stage, but Hevn is determined to make it to the library before the end of the play.

"_Jackal_ ... _Oh_, _yeah_, _you call yourself his agent_ ... _Agent of _what_ I wonder_?" That leer twisting the petty-jealous features of the Commissioner. "_Ouch_! _Watch your hands_! _The library — the old one, mind you_ — _that one that was nearly burned to the ground when the street caught fire, but survived_ ... _Been there all day_ ... _no, I'm not lying_."

* * *

The must from the books and the centuried pages is rubbing off on his hands, the fingertips of his gloves turning browinsh-yellow like a third skin.

Asmodeus. Derived from: L _Asmodaeus_ Gr _Asmodaios_ Talmudic Heb _ashmeday_ Avestan _Aesma daeva_, Aeshma the deceitful; a figure of Jewish folklore; a chief demon.

Lust is a sin of the flesh, craving touch, which leads to uncleanliness. Lust is associated with fury and lechery. Your devil is Asmodeus, your animal the goat, your opposite is chastity, and your element is fire.

Tobit iii: Asmodeus was an evil spirit who loved Sarah and killed her seven husbands. Tobias drove him away and was consequently able to marry Sarah.

Akabane sits under the blinking bulb-light of the dead library, assimilating information he's not sure he knows how to absorb. Because myth is not reality, and his hermaphroditic nemesis tries to mimic myth. From somewhere within that, he must find a weakness.

Tobit: a book of the Apocrypha (one of the fourteen books of the Septuagint that are rejected in Judaism, for not being canonical about Biblical characters) telling the story of an ancient Hebrew in Nineveh. Tobias: that captive. Sarah: wife of Abraham ("father of the Hebrews"), and Issac's mother.

Careful to see no one's watching, beneath the shadow of the reading table, he slips out the scalpel — the hundred and ninth scalpel — Dr. Suzuki inserted up his body.

In the dim light swinging overhead drably, he can easily trace like Braille the writing engraved into the ceramic.

On one side, it is foreign. The dictionary cracked open before him, Akabane painstakingly deciphers the words, rearranging them to make grammatical sense.

"_Lasciate ogni speranza_, _voi ch'entrate_."

All, abandon, hope, who enter.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter.

The other side is clear Japanese.

"_Yakusoku shita_."

Promise, land. Land of Promise.

What is Suzuki trying to say through the terror that has stolen his tongue? What? _What_?

For all he will admit, Akabane knows little of Asmodeus. So little that it scares him. Shehe can do things he has seen no one else do— she sparks fear in him, even if he is not quite sure why.

Around her, he's trapped in an invisible cage. He can't see the bars, but he knows they're there. That's why he chose to run. Choose his battles.

Then, it strikes him.

Suddenly Suzuki's cryptic message shatters like glass and the truth leaks like mercury, glistening and poisonous.

Invisible bars.

Craving touch.

Demon of lust.

Akabane's mouth goes dry.

* * *

The cold takes Hevn by surprise, the breeze lifting her mane of golden hair, her tiger eyes narrowed against the brewing wind. The shadow of a storm clouds the horizon, and she doesn't want to be caught like a deer in the headlights.

She stands before the old library, two-storied with crumbly, chipped walls and windows glowing on the upper floor— yellow-dusty light from old bulbs. She dislikes this place, and the charred-peeling ceilings and the ratty carpet missing in places.

Akabane is in there somewhere, locked in the reading room perhaps, looking up the enigmatic-fearful Asmodeus. Ignorance breeds terror.

Sucking in her breath, she pushes open the blackened hardwood door that creaks on damaged hinges, and goes in.

She wonders, uneasiness pricking her bare skin, where the cold comes from.

* * *

Invisible bars.

Craving touch.

Demon of lust.

For a splintered second of eternal irrationality, Akabane wishes — _craves_ — for stupidity.

Blood is roaring like the hungry sea. Pulse beat thudding like boots on a wooden floor.

And then— he does hear footsteps.

Click-clack of heeled shoes.

He recognizes that beat. He sits very still, one gloved hand hovering before himself. And then— he's on his feet and running to the window.

Shuttered. He has to shove and push to get it open. It begins to annoy him how often he's using this route of escape.

He waits. Breath caught.

The door to the reading room is pushed open further.

"Jackal! I know you're in—"

He vaults over the sill and its dark oblivion beneath and beyond.

He can't be found. Can't be caught. Not yet. Or he's dead.

For Asmodeus, it does not mean flesh of the living; she makes them lust for what they cannot have, driving people to the brink of madness until they kill themselves with the agony of unrealized fantasies.

* * *

Nobody notices the hunched, spidery-handed figure slinking away like a lizard out the door. Hevn is blind and deaf — never mute — as she runs into the reading room.

"Jackal! I know you're in here."

But he isn't.

Only the books he'd been reading are, a pile of open tomes scattered untidily over a rickety table with a bench. She bends down to flick the pages, and only one word stares unblinkingly up at her:

Asmodeus.

She combs the room, but her eyes are closed. She knows she is alone, too late. The open window has whispered that to her a long time ago.

Returning to his table, she reaches for the only clues of his aliveness that he cares to leave her. For the first time, she sees something black lying on the bench.

As if desperate to alleviate the direness of the situation, the laugh breaks out of her frozen throat.

"I suppose leaving behind his hat would have been too cliché," she murmurs, picking up the tie he has left behind for her.

* * *

**Author's Note**: From this chapter on, I've decided to move away from the myopic focus on Akabane and Himiko. It's slow for the plot, and I'll be introducing the others of the GB cast, too. The next chapter also explains in black and white why Akabane's afraid. (I know I should keep my mouth shut, and let you find out for yourself, but I couldn't resist. Promise not to take too long to put it up! 

The information on Asmodeus comes from (in order): the dictionary in Compton's New Century Reference and Encyclopaedia II CD ROM; an Internet quiz; the Oxford Dictionary of English Literature; and the dictionary in Compton's New Century Reference and Encyclopaedia II CD ROM again.


	9. Danse Macabre

**Author's Note**: I'm sorry, I'm sorry! I never thought I'd be this bad at keeping promises! I got a little side-tracked with my other fic, and I didn't mean to leave things hanging with the reason behind Akabane's fear.

**Amethyst** **Hunter**, thanks for both the vote of confidence _and_ the review. Glad you liked the characterization. I've my fingers crossed the actual explanations behind Akabane won't fall _too_ far short of expectations.

**Aquarius Galuxy**, sorry for making you confused; I honestly didn't mean to! Okay, to answer your questions. The spidery-handed figure _was_ Asmodeus herself. Asmodeus was sitting in the library, separated from Akabane by a bookshelf. Not a lackey, not a relative (that last one makes me giggle to imagine Asmodeus's family tree.) The tie? Akabane heard Hevn's footsteps, and knew there were people searching high and low for him (presumably under Himiko's direction.) He couldn't exactly jump out from under a rock, brandishing his arms (he'd be exposing himself to Asmodeus, if he did) and so, he leaves behind his tie so that his "allies" would know he's still alive. He left his _tie_, specifically, because he wanted to do something different and not leave behind his hat, gloves or scalpels. Hmm, as for who's going to appear next— well, Ban definitely, and the supporting cast but I'll leave you to find who _exactly_ in good time. (Give you a hint: Hevn was just the tip of the iceberg.)

**omasuoniwabanshi**, sorry if the black stuff ended up to be banal, but I had to put the oil somewhere. Thanks for what you said about the characterization, and I was punching the air each time you said Asmodeus was creepy (I was never any good at writing horror.) Thanks for what you said about the metaphors— I seriously go crazy with analogies. I had a lot of fun writing Hevn— I love that woman. Asmodeus herself isn't really as impressive as what she can do. Thanks for reviewing— really missed your criticism.

* * *

**Chapter Nine**

"Has Himiko not told you?"

Ban doesn't like being doused with the cold shock of Himiko keeping ugly secrets from him, when he believes they were past something like that a lifetime ago. If consorting with Dr. Jackal is only part of her job, he doesn't see what scrap of an excuse she has left for crossing the ring of fire of work.

Hevn's speckled-tawny eyes regard him coolly, her fingers tapping the scuffed bar-top of the Honly Tonk with the square edge of a scalpel. For a minute, Ban doesn't want to know where she got that one from.

And then he does. And he asks.

In the shortest terms possible, Hevn tells him. She needs to milk Ban dry of information and protect Himiko's particulars at the same time, and doesn't like it. "Akabane is missing. But he's definitely still in town because I found _this_ in the old library yesterday evening. It was hidden under his necktie."

Ban drawls uninterestedly, "Why would he do that?"

"Dunno, but I expect he wanted a certain someone to decipher the funny engravings on his scalpel." She lodges it under his resistant hand lying on the bar.

"Make Himiko do it ... After all, it's her problem." He deliberately pours salt on the petty cattiness of his voice.

"Already did, darling. She says she can't understand one set of engravings. It's in English. Looks Latin or Greek to me."

Ban's eyebrows lift themselves. "Since when was back-alley scum like _Jackal_ ever bilingual?"

In answer, Hevn prods him with the toe of her shoe "Careful, Mido, you're being discriminatory."

"Whatever." For the first time, he raises his hand and peers at the scalpel. "I tell you, this is purely for curiosity's sake. Don't get any ideas." One side of the scalpel is scratched with jagged Japanese lettering:_ Yakusoku shita_. The other side jars his vocabulary.

_Lasciate ogni speranza_, _voi ch'entrate_.

"What does it say?" asks Hevn impatiently.

Ban translates, his voice not hiding his puzzlement fast enough, "Abandon all hope— whoever enters."

Hevn says nothing. Cryptic warnings at eight in the morning are just not her thing. She needs a cup of coffee, perhaps laced with brandy. Not the kind of thing she could ever ask of Natsumi, so she is forced to abstain and be pure and holy. When her voice creeps back into her throat, she blurts out,

"Did they copy that from King Tut's tomb or something?"

* * *

Of all the reasons why one should ever even want to take Ginji Amano out for lunch, this is the most understandable one.

Pump him for information.

Himiko miserably watches her wallet be vacuum-cleaned of its contents as Ginji's finger settles on more and more items on the menu, and the _scritch_-_scratch_ of pen on paper grows ominously louder as the maître d' scribbles down their order faster. "It's all on me," have suddenly become the most dangerous words in the language.

She actually surprises herself by being able to afford it all, but she owes it to the cheque that came in the post for her that morning. From Idashi. From behind the wall of death.

"Hey thanks a lot, Himiko,"

The maître d' has disappeared, and Ginji is leaning over the table on his elbows, beaming at her like a very happy puppy. The undisguised sparkle of his chocolaty eyes are enough to melt her; she gives him a weak smile.

"Free food isn't something I can argue with, you know, and this is a really posh place, too!"

Himiko feet shuffle and kick one another beneath the table. "Yeah, well ... I didn't rob a bank to be able to afford it ... I just made an extra buck and wanted to spend it with a friend..."

"Thanks,"

"Huh? Why?"

Ginji says, with the un-self-conscious openness of the very old or the very young, "For considering me as your friend."

Himiko flushes darkly under the tan. "Ye..." The words melt into sop in her mouth.

It is all that her sense of decency can do to keep her from exploiting him until dessert. She lets him order the expensive cream-rich ice cream that costs thrice as much as the coloured stuff on sticks and in cups and cones one buys from the passing store. She waits until the spoon has removed itself from Ginji's mouth and he is free to speak, and then she feels her conscience will let her ask for the favour now.

Her lips move, part, open, her tongue rises inside the basin of her mouth, until she feels the presence of saliva, teeth, and gums, and suddenly, she realizes she has no voice. She's forgotten how to speak.

Ginji cocks his head, looking at her, puzzled.

"Did you want some ice cream, too, Himiko?"

She starts to move, rouse herself and shake her head, but Ginji's already twisting around in his padded leather seat, calling out, "Waiter! — Hey, waiter!" and then she shakes her head at herself, and gives up. What's the point of voiceless protest anyway? If you are suddenly unable to say no, then it means you wanted to say yes all along.

Ginji resumes his oblivious devouring of dessert, and Himiko goes back to watching him, the uneasy stirring inside her telling her viciously and sadistically how her latest paycheck has all but been shredded to bits before her eyes.

What had she ever been _thinking_? Whispering something into Ginji's ears is the same as shouting it to Ban.

* * *

"Thanks for the tea; it has a nice taste."

Himiko really means it, lowering the tea-cup and saucer onto the dining table in the squashed bare-faced flat no one occupies anymore. The furniture is meagre: a dining table, a lumpy, half-eaten unwanted sofa in the drawing room, a kitchen with a rusty sink, and a bedroom with two futons rolled into a forgotten cupboard. All that is left of a deserted home.

These people live elsewhere now, with someone else, and he has only come on her telephoned request.

"Did you make it?"

A wry twist of his lips. The bells tinkle as Kazuki jerks his head in the direction of the kitchen. "I can't cook."

"Will you thank Juubei for me, then?"

"Of course. He'll be ... mollified, I guess." Exasperation is entwined around that tone like threads of lace. "He insisted on accompanying me to visit whosoever's impertinent enough to want to see me at the Shinjuku house— in his language, in our Shinjuku apartment where Toshiki doesn't belong ... We live in Maze City now, and Juubei's developed this complex that just because he's forced to like Toshiki, everyone else should be as well."

He shakes his head, the sigh barrelling out of his throat. "And I don't care if he hears me either."

"Sorry. I thought you lived here, and when I found out you didn't, I used your neighbour's phone."

Kazuki waves it aside gracefully. Himiko is irresistibly reminded of a haughty society woman, and bites down her lip to keep things to herself. _Talk about Pavlovian reactions_— _and he's not even _trying_ to be a she_.

"So. What did you want me to help out with?"

"Oh that— I kind of need a guide."

"To go where?"

"Lower Town."

Kazuki flinches.

"Back in there?"

"Don't tell me it's dangerous. It's getting cliché."

"As a fee for my services, do I at least get to know _why_?"

"I need to talk to Makubex, that's all."

"Tell her to use the computer!"

A pause. An optic nerve twitches.

"Get out of the kitchen, Juubei! And quit it with the eavesdropping!"

"Yeah right— who says I'm eavesdropping? I busy here!"

"You!"

"Rubbish. If I was— I would have objected to what you said earlier!"

Silence.

"Right..."

Himiko tries to make herself laugh at the interlude.

"Why do you want to meet Makubex all of a sudden?"

The steel in his voice shoots through her like an icicle. The cold grips her like her a thousand nettles all at once. Her throat knots as she smiles and says,

"Just business, that's all."

Kazuki's eyes drop to her tea. "Oh, all right." He doesn't bother to disguise his incredulity.

* * *

"Thanks," says Himiko abruptly, bringing them both to a halt. "For directing me all the way here. I'll go this far."

Kazuki turns to face her in the empty, dustbin-littered street, with the polite smile and raging scepticism. Stranding her in Lower Town is not his idea of chivalry, and when he tries to convey as much silently, he is understood and brushed aside.

"You sure?"

"Mm-hmm. We've crossed unfamiliar territory, and I know my way from here on."

"Right..."

"Don't worry."

The obligatory smile widens with the impatience of her tone. Kazuki gives her a two-fingered salute, last words of farewell, and makes to leave.

He can feel her eyes on his back as he turns the corner out of sight. He really does keep on walking until he's on his way out. He neither detaches one of his strings, nor stays long enough to follow her himself. Being around Juubei has taught him many things, nuances and tricks that pass from his best friend to him like pollen grains on skin.

It is unmistakable the way Himiko shoulders move when she slips one hand behind her back to uncork one of her vials of poison perfume.

If he dares to keep his tabs on her — physically or by string — the scent of her perfume on his body will give him away and she will keep making false turns throughout Maze City to throw him off her track.

Instead— he trusts her judgement and her sense of preservation, and— never leaves the outskirts of Maze City. He will wait for her and listen. He wants to know what business she has here.

All he knows is that she will not go to Makubex.

* * *

In the front bucket seat of the Ladybug, Ban listens to Ginji groan about the demerits of poverty from the back, a speech that would have won any competitive debate, while the cogs whir in his head and he contemplates the state of things.

The scalpel — _Jackal's_ scalpel — disturbs him. Especially when it's coupled with a name like Asmodeus. The freak of a woman who can spit evil. Hevn tells him Himiko tells her Akabane tells her that he met Asmodeus.

Ban pinches the bridge of his nose. _Some people have all the luck_.

Then he thinks about the scalpel, the two sides of queer unconnected phrases that he has assembled into a jigsaw puzzle.

His answer to Hevn's repeated request has always been the same. He refuses to get involved in this madness.

_Abandon all hope_, _ye who enter_. _The Land of Promise_. Asmodeus makes people lust for unattainable dreams, and watches them kill themselves out of despair.

Ban doesn't blame Kuroudo Akabane's sudden and mysterious flight. Cowardice is the one and only answer to a situation like this.

Asmodeus attacks people by getting inside their heads.

A man can always be safe from other men— that is why some people are recluses. A man cannot be safe from himself. His self dogs his every step.

He knows that whatever twisted code of morals Jackal obeys, he will not let Himiko get hurt. If Akabane has dragged Himiko into his bowl of hot soup, it will be Akabane who will ensure she is safe. Ban knows he will be a liability to himself and to Himiko if he were to get involved. He can't protect anyone if he can't protect himself.

Ban and Dr. Jackal are of the same mould. They know the same things.

The only difference between them is Jackal has a simpler sense of right and wrong, good and evil.

Something that Ban will never have, and will never want. Ginji Amano is the warm, alive proof of that.

* * *

If you dangle a carrot, a donkey is sure to follow. Standing in the streets of Lower Town, Himiko watches the donkey emerge from the brush in all his glint and glory.

"Hello— Kagami.


	10. Kiss of the Devil

**Author's Note**: On a personal note, I love this chapter. And like Dr. Suzuki, Keiko Tachiwara's mine alone, not that you'd want someone like her anyway.

(**Rabid** **Lola**— thanks a lot for pointing out the inscription was from Dante. It never crossed my mind.)

**Aquarius** **Galuxy**, yeah, Himiko _did_ come after Ginji to be her guide, but changed her mind at the last minute because he'd certainly tell Ban who'd go all out to stop her. Hey, thanks for saying Juubei was "cute"! I had this adorable mental image of a red-faced chibi-Juubei squawking in indignant fury that he hadn't been doing any eavesdropping. You believed Himiko would go to Makubex?— well, at least I'm credibly convincing (or at least, I hope I am.) I also sent you a PM, addressing the other issues you brought up. Thanks for the review— it was probing.

**LuvInu88**, "consistent" is one compliment that's very flattering. Thank you!

**omasuoniwabanshi**, thanks again for the compliment about Hevn. I love writing her, and I had unimaginable fun vacuum-cleaning Himiko's wallet only to have her writhe in guilt afterwards. Glad you liked the two opposite conversations. The minuet analogy was flattering— thank you! Glad you liked Juubei as well. Ooh, Himiko's going to make her beast of burden slave under the weight of soaked sack of salt. Kagami is absolutely one of my favourite characters.

**Rabid Lola**, I'll take your word for it and not shove essay-long explanations about Asmodeus down your throat. But Akabane's little itch of fear really has nothing to do with Himiko— Ban just means that Akabane's inadvertently made her Asmodeus's prey, and it's Asmodeus who'll save her butt. Glad you liked the Reappearance Of People As Opposed To The Maddening Myopic Focus. About Jackal's value system— it just means that Ban is willing to accept some people are grey, (which is why he's friends with Ginji— my take on their relationship) and Jackal (while he likes to make people wonder where his loyalties lie) demarcates "good and evil" more stringently. (Contrast Jackal's love for killing with that episode about the girl with the bombay blood and his spats with Kagami, I mean, The Donkey— again, my take on the character.)

**Jomai**, ouch, you're asking for speed from one person who couldn't beat a drugged tortoise in a race, when it comes to updating. But okay, I'm trying.

* * *

**Chapter Ten**

They don't live in Shinjuku anymore.

Kuroudo Akabane begins his elusive quest for Asmodeus by following broken hints from Dr. Suzuki's past. The first will be his family. Who have disappeared one fine day, and all attempts to threaten Suzuki into revealing their whereabouts has resulted in the single sentence:

"_The Suzukis don't live in Shinjuku anymore_."

Every time Akabane forgets even a syllable of it, he recalls it by reading it off from where it has been etched into the inside of his head.

The next, as per the list crammed into his pocket, is the widow of a man found disembowelled, reportedly by Asmodeus. But now that he knows the truth, he realizes the dead sod probably did that to himself, while Asmodeus sat perched on a wall somewhere, watching in merry amusement.

Mrs. Tachiwara's Shinjuku is the playground of the wealthy. He feels that same irrepressible flicker of self-doubt as he does around Shido Fuyuki's playmate's mansion, as he walks through the clean-swept streets, the boulevards of towering trees and the stone, marble, polished _rich_ houses. That flickering flame that refuses to go out, poisoning him from inside, telling him he doesn't belong in a place like this.

Perhaps it's real, and because it is real, perhaps it is true.

He whips around to see if Asmodeus is trailing laconically behind him, blackening the edge of his soul. Before this, Akabane has never really known what "class distinction" is.

There is no one around to stare at him, and he ruefully wonders if he misses the attention, as he waits at the door of the late Mr. Tachiwara's house, waiting for the lady of the house to allow him in.

She's podgy like a dumpling, a squashed double-chinned face and with skin that glows not from any fantastic skin-care lotion, but from the jewellery her late husband's left her. There is a curious childish defencelessness in her eyes, pale and startling in her rich-woman's face.

"I was a friend of your husband's," he tells her, lying calmly, soothingly, reassuringly. "He told me once that if anything were to ever happen to him, I should promise to take care of his Keiko for him."

The rose-coloured blush is distorted by her complexion, and she invites him in with demureness and a rustle of her satin dress. The beast within him picks out the infatuated-adolescent act she's playing, and he feels an all-too-familiar rush and hot stab of irritation. _The_ _hell_! Sh_e's rich as a queen and coys up to me like I'm a rich fool to be conned into believing she needs male protection_! _The_ _hell_! He repeats the curse for good measure, widening the easy smile.

Without the effect-garnering hat and the dramatic overcoat, he can quite see where she's coming from, gliding behind her into the house, lowering himself into an armchair with the sinuous grace coiled around him like a fibre of his body.

Against his will — he _hates_ distractions — he can clearly bring to mind a girl who could be richer than this widow and would never stoop as low as this bridegroom-hungry woman. His mouth starts to go dry at the fleeting image of Himiko's visage; he wants to reach out and grab it before it can be ripped to flimsy shreds by his own professionalism.

Chink in his armour.

He smiles; it soft, leonine and pulses in his ethereal violet eyes that have been taught to reveal many, many emotions.

Keiko Tachiwara's husband was the first of Asmodeus's toys. It seems she has started her trail of blood in Shinjuku, and in Shinjuku she stays. Having devised a theoretical idea of Asmodeus's modus operandi, Dr. Akabane, pHD in spook psychology, wishes to learn the logistics of exactly how that fiend operates.

_Because I'm going to keep on running from her as long as I can run_. _But it will not be forever_— _in fact_, _it will not even be long_, _because_ she has singled me out. _A marked man_. How amusing ... for her.

* * *

There exist only two realities for her now.

One where _he_ is there; one where _he_ isn't.

This stranger is carefully nudging his way into the second one, and there is something so palpably unnerving about his perennial smile, that politeness and reassurance that seems so utterly, deliberately calculated that she is afraid. But if _he_ trusted this man, she mustn't be afraid. _She_ trusts _him_ utterly— her husband.

And so, Keiko Tachiwara is not frightened of the man she has let into the protective intimacy of her home.

He says he's been travelling overseas for the past couple of years, that he saw Tachiwara so long ago but his death hit home so hard it felt as if he'd only Tachiwara the day before. "I can imagine how terribly devastated you are..."

And Keiko doesn't tell him that indeed she's not devastated. Not at all. Why will she be? There are two realities: in the other one, _he_ is alive, there, tangible, right beside her.

But she can't tell anyone. No one will believe her. Why should they? They all saw Tachiwara fall, topple from the roof of a building, his head thumping open on the unshaven gravel. They'd all seen what had happened to him, his midriff barely even there. Ravaged like he'd been mauled.

* * *

Akabane listens to her in silence.

_Two_ _realities_? This woman has been pushed off the edge herself, hanging by her fingertips.

In the upper circles of the underworld, where only devils like himself are allowed entry, people believe Asmodeus murdered Tachiwara one night. Akabane has never seen Tachiwara in his life, but he still cannot push down the gut feeling that it was Tachiwara who mutilated himself.

Perhaps out of mercy, (the kind of mercy only she can define) Asmodeus had pushed him off the roof, sending him flying, flying down.

* * *

Keiko feels suddenly weary of the conversation.

She realizes she has neither offered him tea, nor does he expect some. He is a friend of Tachiwara's?— oh how lovely. But now, he must leave so that she can slip into the other reality— where _he_ is there, waiting for her.

The loose nerves are being frayed by the scissors of their chatter. Akabane doesn't like the roundabout turns they are taking.

Oh you knew my husband when he was in college? — And a fine young man he was — Yes, everyone thought so.

So you travel? — A good deal — You must miss a lot of your friends.

It is useless, useless! Oh so pathetically useless! He feels like leaping at her, her throat squeezing, contracting, choking, strangling in his hands.

He wants to howl. Shriek.

* * *

She does not feel like she can keep it up any longer. Keiko lets go. She opens her hand, and the rope slips out of her grasp. She's given up this game of tug-of-war.

Out of the periphery of her consciousness, somewhere so far away, her voice is forming words. Speaking. "I'm so tired..."

Blurred figures are moving. Her feet are in motion beneath her. Her guest leading the way. She closes the front door after him, latching it from within with a gentle click.

There are hands on her shoulders, massaging them flesh. Oh, so soothing ... so warm ... so alive...

She closes her eyes (were they even open?) and leans back into the solid warmth of Tachiwara's presence. His long, fine-boned hands kneading her shoulders with the surety of a lover's...

* * *

Keiko Tachiwara is so far removed from the world of the moving, talking, tangible living, she never really realizes whose hands they are. Who those long, spidery hands belong to.

* * *

Unceremoniously kicked out by a droopy hostess, Kuroudo Akabane walks down the front steps of the Tachiwara house, suddenly wishing he had a pack of cigarettes. One of those queer, irresistible human urges he feels like trying out once in a while.

It is dark outside. The pall of evening has fallen too suddenly for him to realize, and an invisible pair of arms slip around him from behind.

Cold, icy invisible arms. Icy breath hissing down the back of his collar.

He can't explain it. Doesn't know what the hell is going on. Bemused. Struggling to place himself. Fear slinking around the corners of his conscious being like murky oil.

* * *

The next morning, there is an obituary in the newspapers. Widow Keiko Tachiwara killed herself, breaking the glass pane of her bedroom window to plunge the shards unnervingly precisely into her heart. A maid had heard her scream out to her dead husband— she was begging him not to leave.

Akabane feels like his shoes have melted into an sticky, gluey puddle at his feet, rooting him to the pavement beside the newspaper stand. He feels like a colossal fool. A monumental one.

He'd gone to visit Mrs. Tachiwara to instruct himself in the ways of Asmodeus, and that bitch of a fiend had personally given him a visual demonstration. He'd not even realized it.


	11. The Donkey Who Knew

**Author's Note**: Thank you to **Aquarius Galuxy**— you've inspired me with a plot twist. (It comes right at the end, but I owe you nonetheless.)

**Bons Baisers**, your review definitely turned me red instead of making me _see_ red. "Entrancing" and "original" are two of the best compliments in the world. Thank you for using them with regard to ADF. I never thought I could make my stories properly visual, but you boosted my confidence up a few notches. Glad you liked it, and didn't get put off by the smokiness.

**Aquarius Galuxy**, sorry if the last chapter was short, but I never write them by length. I just keep on writing until I run out of ideas and then fish out a good place to end. I'm immensely glad the plot bunnies are still hanging around. (Nonetheless— thank God you can't lift a giant stapler.) Your sympathy was much appreciated, and I hope the bunnies stick around until I finish the face-off. I don't think Kazuki and Juubei will appear again— well, they'll make a cameo, along with all of the others of the extra GB cast one last time, but I don't have a place to put them in. You said in your review: "... Akabane subjects himself to torture by talking to a hallucinating widow." I didn't really get what you meant by that. I got as far as "hallucinating," but Akabane didn't know what was happening just then, so I'm clueless about "torture." You also called him "masochistic"— he _was_ masochistic once _before_, but I didn't understand the context you used it in. Keiko Tachiwara's suicide will explain itself eventually; thanks for calling Asmodeus "scary"!

**omasuoniwabanshi**, thanks for the thumbs-up, meant a lot of confidence; who cares how long you take to review! Just glad you read it and liked it. Since Asmodeus is brand-new, she _has_ a lot to live up to, considering the phalanx of villains and anti-heroes in GB canon (Kagami being the coolest), so I'm putting her into the psychological villain category instead of the beefsteak one. Thanks for what you said about widow Tachiwara; I was afraid that her oblivious dreaminess would end up confusing the reader, or making them think she was an opium-eater. "Creepiness upon creepiness"!— wow, what a flattering compliment!! Thanks also for what you've said about Akabane-Himiko. I couldn't see him getting attached to anyone (except himself) but he's not stupid enough to believe he doesn't need help. (Unlike someone else ... like maybe Saito ... oh, I dunno...)

* * *

**Chapter Eleven**

"Kagami."

She acknowledges him with a flick of her head, and his lip curls, but somehow since he's so used to her— used to _it_ _from_ her (he corrects himself firmly) he cannot be bothered be bothered to change himself, or even her pretty habits.

Pretty _grating_ habits, he tells himself. That is a good word. Grating.

"My, my, my, lil' Miss Kudo..." His serpentine tongue flicks over his lips, as he leans over his raised knee on the edge of a building, leaning over to look closer at her. She is grinning.

"Dangle the carrot," she says wickedly, drawing out every word with happy emphasis, "and out comes the donkey."

The irritation slashes at him with its red-hot blade. It stings where it touches. The inner core. So if she isn't going to be friendly... "What can I say, Miss Kudo?" he sneers, making something so petty into something so silky. "Sometimes one must do things to oblige other people."

"Yeah right—" She snorts up breath, exhaling it in a perfectly nasal, asinine, "_Ee_-_hnaw_."

"Chew cud," he snarls, vaulting over the roof, and dropping to a crouch on a broken window's sill several floors below and a few floors up.

"Touchy!" she laughs, and her eyes glimmer with determination. "I need you—"

"Yes," he drawls, "I have rather been expecting you to say that for a _long_ time..." Before he can contemplate on how the air is suddenly flying with involuntary innuendos, a jagged pebble from the ground is in her hand and is being flung straight at him.

He ducks ungracefully in his haste, dipping back up with deliberate reputation-restoring composure, not following the pebble as it sails through the window right behind him, clattering on the floor inside. "If you are done assaulting me—"

The second pebble bouncing in her palm is sent flying with a whoosh of air, and he dodges again, but this time she intervenes, "I need you to help me out."

A stunned sort of silence, (only he'll be lying if he said he believes that.) He cannot be taken off-guard for a moment, not he, who is like wood charcoal, adsorbing everything on the surface. It is a blatant, hissing lie that his arrogance has never made him assume it is Lady Poison who will come to him for help when—

"Your problem is with Kuroudo Akabane."

"How do you know?" Her jaws clench tighter than her fists.

"My dear, the world is drowning in rumours," and he loves being on top, being the one who is pushing _her_ head under water. "And knowing what you probably want to pit me against, do you honestly believe I'm willing to help you?" She says nothing, and he plunges ahead with a savage pleasure he is sure he'll never get again.

"I mean, _honestly_, what's in it for me? Any quirks? Benefits? Nothing. The goodness of my heart is not enough to suffice—"

His voice is so insidiously obnoxious when he drawls that the last pebble tears itself from Himiko's hand, grazing past Kagami's cheek.

"Shut up," she hisses. "One would think the temptation of being able to recover a lifetime's supply of fun, a.k.a. Akabane, would have been enough—"

"You honestly don't know a whit about Asmodeus, do you, girl?" His voice slices past her throat like a razor's edge. His words crack into a laugh, and it is cold, cruel and derisive like the touch of acid on her skin.

But she will not be tempted into fear.

"And so what will you do?"

Her words sound cocky in her ears, hollow with his resonant ring of truth. What chance does she expect to have before someone even Dr. Jackal is _scared_ of? The tingle of gooseflesh against her skin— Himiko is suddenly frightened.

_What_ _the_ _hell_, snarls Lady Poison from deep within her. _You've never met Asmodeus_. _Save your fear for _then. Because there was _Kagami_ — and not Asmodeus — before her, and nothing unnerved her more. Her pearl-shined teeth gleamed in a smirk. He'd been silent all along.

The grand master of Fate, Kyoji Kagami had been silent.

"And besides," she goes on, aware of the triumph brushing close to her fingertips, electricity crackling across her heart, "what need would I have of _you_ if I knew?"

"Oh, indeed," and beneath the bored, laconic turn of phrase, he is calculating what she wants, what he wants to give her, how much he wants to keep for himself and away from her.

Hadn't the almighty Ban Mido no clue what he was getting into when he faced Dr. Jackal for the first time? Himiko is not so different from him after all...

She calls up to him on the window-sill, "So. Enough intellectual repartee. What'll it be, Kagami?"

His linen-jacket padded shoulders rise elegantly and fall. His mouth is twisted in the same leering smirk.

"I suppose I could tag along for this ride ... it'll be _interesting_ to observe the ending."

Himiko does then something she thoroughly enjoys doing: she bursts out laughing at him.

"Hah! I knew you'd never say no." She snorts under her breath: "Honest-to-god, a donkey and his carrot if I ever saw one."

Kagami feels like he's been pinched. Silently shooting vile obscenities at Pavlovian reactions, he calls down sweetly: "So, what? — you like being called a vegetable now?"

* * *

Dr. Suzuki likes his days off. Or so he did once upon a time.

Nowadays he likes to keep himself occupied, but when the patients come in no more because they believe officially his clinic hours are over, what can he do to change things? To change the uncoiling fear inside him?

Ever since he's given Akabane the clue cut into a scalpel, ever since he's kicked Akabane out of his life when the stubborn man comes to him, wanting to know the whereabouts of his family— he's been afraid of his shadow. Asmodeus can melt into shadows.

And she's been following him.

Every day and every night. She wants him. And he knows he's going to die.

This time lightning is going to strike twice, this time it won't miss.

* * *

Himiko laughs into the afternoon air as she roars through the streets on her motorbike without a helmet in a giddy fit of wanton impulsiveness. _Kagami is waiting for her_. Kagami! _Kyoji Kagami_!

Some of that giddiness is seeping into her through the cracks and crevices in her soul. She had expected fight — she had _yearned_ for one — and not supposed he would give in it at all. But— if she can be sure Asmodeus is as strong as Akabane (stronger?) then Kagami is the last person she knew to turn to.

There is also Ban.

He does neither trust nor feel for Akabane. His blood surges like the hungry tide at the sight of Dr. Jackal, but what can he care about the man, Kuroudo Akabane?

And Kagami— whom he loathes.

What might he say if he could see her now, laughing because she's secured the dubious assistance of a man who's tried to kill her under orders because it'll amuse him, to assist a man who's slaughtered because it's amusing?

When _has_ she ever cared about what Ban _says_ to her? But now — _now_ is different — because she is afraid he will be right.

She jingles her house and motorbike keys on the ring, whistling as she mounts the stairs, without knowing why. She wants to soak and melt away into a hot bath, and maybe find a way to use Kagami to find Akabane. She knows how precarious her position will be without a definite plan— Kagami is one of those creatures who are shocked speechless by assertive authority.

But, she reminds herself, it isn't an irreversible phenomenon. Then she wonders, suddenly, because it might have never struck her ever:

What might _Akabane_ say if he knew about Kagami?

And that is why she loses her footing as she lurches through the air, the stony concrete of the stair banging into one knee hard enough to send pain searing across the inside of her eyes and head, falling the rest of the way— until the hands grip her at last, tightly, ungently, firmly, pulling her up to her feet.

"Hey— you okay?"

She bites her cheek to make the impossible pain subside, and nods deliberately, barely able to face the one who's caused all of this.

Fingers reach out tentatively to touch her knee, jerking away as she winces. She is surprised by this uncharacteristically open tenderness, and refrains from the exaggerated comment about how awful the bruise will be.

"C'mon— let's go in. Oh, you dropped the keys—" She grabs the banister and hobbles up to the landing as her pillar suddenly ducks down to collect her ring of keys. They make it together to the front door, and she unlocks it, letting him into the flat.

"You feeling all right, Ban?" she blurts out suddenly, unable to hold it back.

He shakes his head with a grin. "Probably not."

"Want something to drink? There's coffee beans and Coke."

"Water."

It is her cloak, her shroud, her desperate distraction as she moved like a robotic hostess. She goes to find him experimentally sitting in her art deco chair like he's never seen it before. She hands him the glass of water from the fridge, wiping her hand that is slick with condensation, knowing he doesn't like the design of the chair. He's only ever been allowed to glimpse her drawing room. She never let him in properly before now.

And she wonders why she wonders what he thinks of her home.

Only after Ban goes away, does she let herself admit the truth— she wants the security he can give her.

"So. Now that I've let you in and have a good long gape at my flat— what'd you come here for?"

He shrugs. "I dunno. Just wanted to check up on you." The scalpel Hevn had shown him is wrapped carefully in a handkerchief in the pocket of his trousers.

"Really now..."

He lounges cockily in the chair, and she perches on the coffee table a few feet away. There is a glass vial of perfume taped beneath it again.

"I don't have all the time in the world, Ban. I've got a rendezvous elsewhere right now, and I want to be freshened up before that."

His sculptured face furrows darkly in sheer annoyance. "Why is it," he growls bitterly, "that every time I come here you have someplace else to be? Last time it was a client; now it's what?— a date?" He wants to say he's missed having her to banter with, missed seeing her at the Honky Tonk, missed _her_. The essence of her stays with him, but her — body and soul he hasn't been able to find.

None of his feelings show in his face, and Himiko laughs with some of the old giddiness. He looks so sulky and sullen to her. "Don't pout like a brat, Ban— I've got a life. It makes money ... Which is more than what I can say about you."

"What!" He leaps out of the chair with the grace of a lion that's been stabbed. He towers over the disliked chair, puffing and panting, glad for this chance to play on the stage, "_I_ try to be social and _this_ is what I _get_?"

Himiko prettily flutters her fingers at him. "Buh-bye, then."

"See ya."

_He really _is_ leaving_!— she thinks with a pang of dismay, sliding swiftly off the coffee table to see him out.

_Ouch_, thinks he. _She must really be eager to go on her date_. The wrapped scalpel feels tangible against his thigh. He is stiff and cold as she shows him to the door. He stops once outside the threshold, half-turning to look at her.

"Don't forget your promise," he reminds her, his voice husky of its own accord. "You're sworn not to do anything stupid."

She laughs, amused and cynical at the same time, because he doesn't know a whit of what she's going to do.

* * *

Blasted by a whoosh of cold air, Himiko's arms wrap themselves around her as she emerges from her building, her head shooting up reflexively to look at the sky. She sees the night and its star-spangled banner you never see in the city, and then she knows she's _not_ looking at the sky.

It's dust.

Kagami comes vaulting down from the roof of the building in a shimmer of ground diamonds, landing in an obsequious crouch on the ground. He looks like he's waiting for her to tell him to kiss her feet. She looks down the bridge of her nose at him, the flame of aversion rising in a hot flush up her throat again.

"I suppose you've been spying instead of waiting nicely in Maze City?"

He rises; in the single, fluid movement, he carries the unmistakable laconic grace of a leopard. The savage of the cats. "Shall we go?"

"Yes."

They set off down the street, the rhythm beating in the air, they in tandem. His hands are in his pockets, his earring glimmers and twirls; he walks with that characteristic feral prowl. If anyone were to see them now, there would no mistaking who she was walking with.

All the while she waits. She waits to know where they are going, why they are going, and the elusive question he has resisted answering all day: who is Asmodeus. _What can she do to Akabane_.

Kagami isn't chatty; he doesn't talk deliberately, so all the while Himiko's as uncomfortably aware of him as if he were pressing down on her throat. Uneasily aware as he sucks away the heat from her blood.

They walk faster and faster, more and more unconscious, but strangely she recognises the city like there is something invading the back of her mind making her focus. When they stop, the only thing she sees is a chain-link fence.

Her vision clears and there is a barren field beyond it. What is so strange is that it is dark — the murky colour of _pitch tar _— an _alive_ darkness — all around. There is a tiny outhouse with a tin roof in the distance, its shadow splaying across the cracked, infertile ground. What chills Himiko is that she can see the shadows of it moving.

Kagami begins to scale the fence, and blocks her view. She watches him arch his body over the barbed wire on top and drop unharmed to the ground on the other side. She is apparently expected to follow; she knows she is afraid of the spiked wire.

"Come on, Lady Poison—"

_Is it his voice that's doing it_? She doesn't know know. Himiko wants to cry out in alarm as she feels all fear sleeking down her body like water running off her skin. She can feel the links in the fence, feel her fingers hooking through them, her shoes dragging up beneath her. She shimmies like a cat and just as mechanically.

The wire scratches her across her stomach, rips the fabric of her pants. There is blood, tiny crimson rubies clinging to the spiky knots, as she lands on the ground beside Kagami.

He touches her shoulder, and suddenly, like she's been brought back to life, the pain erupts like she's been scorched.

Her elbow is numb as Kagami holds her, steers her slowly towards the outhouse which has miraculously become a shed, towering over her. "Any time now," he whispers, and she only sees his lips move. "_Be on your guard_—"

Whatever has been holding her from within suddenly lets go of her heart. She's falling — straight from the sky, no ground beneath her feet — falls straight into her body. With a convulsive shudder, she jerks away from Kagami's touch.

Suddenly she is aware of what is going on. The world is spinning all around her.

She's alone. To the core of her soul, she is alone tonight.

There is someone beside, iridescent and fiery.

The land is empty, save a white-shirted man standing in one corner, shying just away from the light. He seems to be a riches-to-rags story, walking on earth like a shameful phantom.

A cruel scream of laughter rattles through the air.

The shiver plunges down to the depth of Lady Poison's being. She realises why fear rings through the earth when Asmodeus laughs. _She is so very human, but the laugh makes that seem like a desperate self-delusion_.

"My mad tea party has finally arrived!"

Kagami smiles, a thin, inhuman smile. "Oh, so it has. The lady Asmodeus is indeed perceptive."

The shadows move and flicker in their drably-lit corner of the city, and Asmodeus moves with them. She is their devil, only this time she doesn't reside on their shoulders. This time, she's in their head.

A cold voice drawls, "Hello again, Lady Poison."

That phantom at the corner is Dr. Jackal.


	12. Tremors

**Author's Note**: Akabane versus Asmodeus has finally come. With a side-dish from Kagami, of course (I can totally imagine him as a penguin-suited maître d'.)

**Bons Baisers**, wow, thank you— that was an awesome compliment. And I'm glad you like this story and the writing style— I just hope it won't start resembling a downward-dipping graph anytime soon.

**Aquarius Galuxy**, you didn't inspire that climax— you inspired the Suzuki bits and how to extend the story. And if Asmodeus is real or not— that's a pretty good question — to be answered in due time! Whether he hides in a windowless room or not, sooner or later Asmodeus will find him ... Oh, okay, now I get what you _meant_— I was just thrown on the wrong track by the word "masochistic." Masochism is the psychological "phenomenon" where the person derives sexual _pleasure_ from pain. Perverse, yeah, and I don't see Akabane as that kind of guy— sadistic _definitely_. Hey, thanks for calling the Kagami-Himiko exchange interesting and amusing! Oh yeah— Himiko's eyes must have really bugged out at being called a "vegetable." Kagami's involvement with Asmodeus ... hmm, million-dollar question. "The truth shall be REVEALED!!! ... after the commercial..." (insert peppy music.)

**omasuoniwabanshi**, appreciate the vote of confidence. Glad to hear Kagami and Himiko amused you, even if his characterization isn't up to par. And oh yes, _is_ he or is he _not_ Judas? — either way, I wish he'd kiss Himiko sometime. It'd be cute to see her reaction. Yeah, if Himiko's willing to put up with a psychotic who called her a carrot, then, she must seriously be intent on finding Akabane. "Hardly in the best of circumstances" is bang-on. "Those two were at such cross purposes, hurting one another by refusing to show their true feelings and taking one another at their surface words." — is sad and evocative. Writing Ban-Himiko is _fun_! And I'm glad you liked the analogies— they were my favourites, too.

* * *

**Chapter Twelve**

"Shido, could you please hand me my wrap?"

The pulse in the hollow of his throat quickens.

Madoka's hand is laid in entreaty before him, and he slides the bush jacket off himself and carefully puts its around her. The material is good, thick and warm. "Are you all right?" he whispers, for he'll be evicted from the concert hall if he's any louder. Already, people are staring starkly at his clothes and hair. "You were saying they should turn up the air conditioner half an hour earlier."

She gives him a puzzled smile. "I know ... but it's suddenly so cold ... and it's not a fever ... I just feel so cold _inside_."

Perhaps she can't see him, but she feels Shido tighten beside her, can hear him swallow in his throat. His arm moves around her until she's pressed against the warm, solid wall of his chest. He gives her a reassuring squeeze, trying to lend her some part of him. She lays her head on his shoulder and closes her eyes.

She can hear the piano, far, distant and sweet, and she can feel herself drifting away, but she catches hold of the material of Shido's shirt, which is warm, safe, and she slowly floats back into her own body.

But it's so difficult, and the cold so inhumanely overpowering.

* * *

Drunken carolling is all that is left to finish the mood, but one doubts Sakura will appreciate it. Sometimes she is so prim and proper that she's not a sister but a mother ... sometimes it can be so evident Juubei was not the only one of the Kakeis made to grow up too fast.

Kazuki is abhorrent to drink— _liquor_ abhors him, for he cannot hold it, being too easily and violently sick. Juubei on the other hand can perform smaller miracles, and with each drop that is sucked into him like there is a small vacuum created inside him, a part of him is sucked in too. He walks straighter, firmer, tougher, harder, and good lord— he _rambles_ on about the philosophical aspects of the stars at night.

It never fails to amuse Kazuki how his best friend, stoic and wildly sentimental at the same time, can be so deeply astrological.

Between the sister-mother and him they prop Juubei on their shoulders of support, and they weave through the streets under the flashing, flaring electric lights and hunt their way home. Juubei is in full swing of inspiration, Kazuki is dizzy on his feet, and Sakura is laughing in her throat at these toy men.

For the first time, they actually listen to Juubei. The man's face is awash with sudden colour, his mouth shaping words as his face expresses them.

Kazuki chuckles hoarsely, clicking off a chain reaction like scattering dominoes, although a second later, neither can remember what was so funny. All of them are suddenly laughing, until the laughter is abruptly wrenched out of Sakura's throat, and she falls to a frozen halt, like the melting ice in the air has suddenly shot into her like lightning, so that she has been transformed into a living glacier.

"It's so _cold_ tonight..."

* * *

When Ban Mido starts to complain and scheme to have the Subaru upgraded somehow or the other because the engine hum reverberates too loudly through the hood, Ginji knows he's babbling because he wants to be distracted. Ban loves his car.

The country is lonely and the trees shiver forlornly in the wind with the _scriich_-_scricch_ of leaves grazing against one another.

_Funny_, thinks Ginji, _it was all so fine a minute ago_. He glances sideways at Ban, the cigarette clenched between the other boy's lips, face vacant of every last trace of humanity. He's been like this — stolen elsewhere — throughout the drive he suggested.

It isn't the kind of atmosphere that invites talk, no, not at all, when Ban's face is clenched and white and painful. Ginji twists in the bucket seat, trying to glimpse those electric blue eyes. _Ban is his best friend_. He wants to reach out and clasp Ban's shoulder, but suddenly lightning ripples through him from within, and Ginji can't move.

Throat gone dry. Can't seem to breathe. Cold — coldness as cold as rain — sinking slowly through his skin, falling into him, filling him up, weighing him down. Someone's squeezing his heart.

Ban stares dead straight ahead, heart thumping so hard in his ribcage that it hurts and he knows Ginji can hear it too. He feels Ginji stiffen beside him, and he writhes inside in guilt and horror that will rip out through his chest. Somewhere out there, there is Himiko.

He can't help her. He'll only get them both killed if he does.

And if the night is any indication, he can sense what she's up against right now. This single moment in cruel time. He bites his lip, crushing it under the weight of his guilty misery.

* * *

They had all felt it, who were sensitive, not yet corrupted and dulled by the poisonous dust of their lives into mechanical appreciation of Nature which quivers like a breathing creature all around, all the time.

There was Madoka, who has not been able to see the difference between black and white, who can only feel.

Juubei is like her, but had once been blessed with the five senses he robbed from himself, never truly becoming as perceptive as his sister. Elemental in cloth, Sakura Kakei's hands touch fabric, create fabric, until _her_ senses are honed and they shine in the darkest, faintest light.

And Ginji, striving to feel coldness so that he can shrink away further from it, feeling for heat as instinctively as a child loves a parent.

Asmodeus is a part of Nature. A part that's like a wood carving with a heart that beats so loudly it comes alive out of the woodwork. She is the human mind, and the devil that haunts it.


	13. The Kingfisher

**Author's Note**: I suddenly got the brilliant idea to name my chapters, but a little too late. I've labelled all the previous ones— check them out sometime.

Also, **Aquarius Galuxy **raised an interesting point, when she asked "what form Asmodeus takes"— I mean one minute, she's cackling, killing, etc, and the next second she's suddenly intangible. I just wanted to clear that part up, if anyone else also wanted a clarification.

_Asmodeus_ is a _tangible_ character, following people around, creeping them out, causing their deaths, etc, but because of her _powers_, she is this "psychological phenomenon" (if that makes any sense) that invades people's heads. She is sort of the personification of self-induced mental negativity: doubt, despair, hopelessness. If that wasn't clear enough, tell me and I'll try and give a better explanation.

**Aquarius Galuxy**, I got the meaning of your question this time::does victory dance:: And thanks for saying you liked the last chapter the best! I had to keep producing explanations for everything, and ended up producing ridiculous bald patches on my head because I was tearing my hair out. A vote of confidence after being turned completely bald is as good as a wig. How Juubei and Kazuki got drunk is up to interpretation; I didn't write that part because it wasn't relevant to the story just then. (But now you mention it ... I wouldn't mind finding out myself...) I just needed them drunk to blunt their senses. Shido's animal senses— good question. But see, Asmodeus can manipulate _human_ minds because humans _alone_ dream extravagantly, and they alone have devised a "Paradise" or even "demons." Animals are simpler creatures; Asmodeus would reflexively give Shido a wide berth when on a suicide-causing spree.

**LuvInu88**, thanks for the double thumbs-up!

**Rabid Lola**, I am deeply shocked and flattered: those two were the longest reviews you've ever posted for this story ever. And nice to hear I could make you like Kagami (yeah, I was sufficiently palacted.) And wow, moment of celebration: did Asmodeus _really_ freak you out or are you just saying?? The romantic liaisons of Shido and Asmodeus in a remake of "So I Married an Axe-Murderer"— now _that's_ freaky. Picturing a drunken Juubei Kakei now is my official anti-depressant. Glad you like the cameos of the last chapter, and minus grammar, I don't see your language going down the drain (unless you mean you're suddenly typing out each word painstakingly.) Somehow, I personally like the parts about Ban the best, in the last chapter and overall. You're actually the first person to ask about an ending, and my PR guy is threatening me at gunpoint to say: not sure.

* * *

**Chapter Thirteen**

**The ****Kingfisher**

Terror swoops through Lady Poison, ripping her throat out of her body. She cannot scream, cannot move like her legs have been sawed away.

A giant vulture shoots off the edge of the roof of the shed, a tattered mass of black and red and dark green fabric flying across the sky, parallel to the earth— _straight at her_.

The human-demonic vulture shrieks in laughter as it sails over her head, flying for Dr. Jackal.

The night explodes in a shimmering cloud of starry light, and there are scalpels flying out of the core of the earth. Dr. Jackal is standing in the eye of the storm, a flash of black and white, and there is a taunting hiss and Asmodeus disappears.

"Where is she?" mumbles Himiko thickly, surprised to taste sand in her mouth. There is the metallic tang of blood.

Suddenly she can't get up.

Kyoji Kagami is perfectly on top her, literally her inhuman shield. He had knocked her to the ground as Asmodeus dived for her.

The ground trembles beneath Himiko's flattened knees, and the scalpels tear themselves out to return soaring to their master. Kagami shoves her head back into the earth — _this_ time without apparent cause — and she slams her elbows into his ribs to push him off her. He rolls away, and she's back on her feet.

Asmodeus is back on her perch on the roof-shed. Her face is invisible beyond the whirlwind of flying clothes and witch-like black hair on a windless night. Only her voices sounds and echoes.

Horror kicks in through Himiko's body, and reflexively a hand reaches behind her back as she whirls around to face Kagami. "_You_!" she yells. "What's going on?"

Kagami smiles, a flicker in the darkness that he is. "I brought you to Asmodeus, Lady Poison, that's all ... It's what you wanted, after all."

"I wanted to find Akabane."

"He is also here."

So far silent, self-effacing, the existence of his presence returns to Himiko in a breathless rush. She gropes in her heart to find the words for what she feels, but she cannot take her eyes off Kagami. "Don't change subjects," she growls. "What did you have to do with any of this?"

"I came to find out how it would all end, didn't I?" The earring twirls, casting a dazzling beam of light that spotlights them all in turn. "I decided to _spice_ _up_ the scenario while I was at it ... make it more ... entertaining..."

_You call_ THIS _entertaining_? Himiko wants to scream out the fury bottled like a vengeful genie inside her. Her eyes slide to Akabane. "Where've _you_ been all this while?" she demands, rounding on him.

He shrugs, polite, respectful, mocking, coldly calculating.

"Making a living. Literally."

In silent insinuation, his eyes are flicked at Kagami. Himiko feels that familiar flush rise up her throat. "I didn't know you were friends with Kagami, Miss Kudo."

"We're not," snaps Lady Poison tightly. She rounds on the creature in question, and he coolly stares back into her gaze, making her apprehensive to even ask the simplest questions. _It is beginning to sink into her again the truth of who he is_— _what he can do_.

_But he has saved her life_.

"How did you know where to find Asmodeus?" she demands harshly.

_Or has spared it for a few seconds longer_.

"From an observatory somewhere," he says simply, shrugging. "Flawless bird's eye view."

A tinkle, a cough, or a hacking shriek.

From behind them, the shadows twist and writhe and rise and fall, and Asmodeus is on the roof of the shed again, towering over them all. Involuntarily, Lady Poison's heart ricochets in her chest.

"Dr. Jackal and the accompaniments have arrived, I see."

In unison they turn, the slowest, most controlled collective movement ever made without gunpoint. The starlight is ghastly, dazzlingly bright, and the first thing anyone sees is Asmodeus. She stands with her arms folded, and the hands make shivers sleep on Himiko's spine. Those fingers are so thin, horny and brittle one marvels at how they have not snapped into chalkdust.

Himiko flinches and tears away her gaze. From beyond the veil of slashing black hair, only the eyes of a demon are visible: gold rimming two depthless caverns.

"Now that I have your attention..."

"What do you _want_?"

Asmodeus's head snaps around like a separate being independent of her. Her lips curve into a smile, and it chills Himiko that she can _see_ that grin — sense it — beyond the flying veil.

"_So_ impatient, Jackal ... I'm not sure it's a trait I like, oh, no, no, _not at all_..." Her voice dips until it's like a razor slicing coarse jute.

"Well, you've got _me_, haven't you?" Himiko dares to look away from Asmodeus — half-expecting to be murdered any second now — and Dr. Jackal looks eerie and defenceless without the coat, the hat jammed firmly down on his face. A violet eye, watching like a serpent, visible through the slit in the brim. "I know you're dead scared of _me_ because I know how to cheat and win your fun little mind games..."

A fiery hiss erupts from Asmodeus's throat, like an invisible snake in the grass. A hiss of recoil and unadulterated hate.

"But _what_ do you want with the two of _them_?"

Moving like a creature on its own, once again Asmodeus carefully turns her head. Himiko's chin lifts to let her throat swallow, but she's suddenly forgotten how to move. The caverns are looking straight at her. The smile — the honeyed, gaping mouth with its bestial teeth is _smiling for her_.

"It's because Miss Kudo has seen the real me. If she saw me down the street, she'd pounce on me and try to kill me. Unlike many people— Miss Kudo has no qualms about killing — _do_ you, my darling Lady Poison?"

The voice makes the frozen emotion knot and twist in Himiko's stomach. A queer tumult of cold fear, frightening apprehension, and something akin to anger.

_Miss Kudo has seen the real me_—? When? _Think_, Himiko!

Then she remembers.

The image is so clear, so perfectly preserved in the cesspit of memory, that Himiko knows she isn't doing it: someone else is playing games with her mind. The soft horrified moan slides out of her throat: someone else is in her head.

An image of the day _after_ Dr. Jackal appeared for the last time at her doorstep. The Honky Tonk. Tangible tendrils of boredom wrapping themselves around her, gently strangling her. A tart sitting at the counter. Heaped with beads and shawls. Himiko had not seen her face.

_But it had been Asmodeus_.

The image shatters into a thousand pieces. Surrounded by the barrenness by foes-turned-friends and foe-or-friends, she can't stop the sensation of terrible realization trickling down her self. That tart had been there when the Get Backers had come in. She'd been there when Himiko had asked Ban about Dr. Jackal—

And the tart had heard.

It makes sense to her now.

_That_ was why on the transport job with Idashi they'd been ambushed in the night. Maybe Asmodeus has nothing to do with Idashi's death. Maybe she has been following Himiko because she thinks Himiko knows what Akabane knows.

She has two seconds left to let the breathe escape in a tiny whoosh before the hard pain filling her head from behind floods everything else away.

With a thud, Asmodeus, flown off the roof like a hunting kingfisher, as beautiful and as merciless, has thrown her flat on the ground. Like a gremlin, a demon is perched crouching on Himiko, feet pressing down on her stomach, squashing the breath slowly painfully out of her.

There are hands tightened around her throat. White, scaly hands that end in talons digging into the soft flesh of Himiko's neck. For an eternity locked into a moment, she is too stunned with fear to react, to struggle, to _breathe_— because it hurts, and she closes her eyes to close out the blackness streaming towards her, but there is blood — warm, thick, precious, bejewelled blood rolling down her skin, the touch of which makes her feel like she's _alive_.

Himiko screams. A gargling, hopeless, reflexive, desperate cry. Suffocated by her own blood. Her eyes shoot open as she thrashes on the ground, arms pinned beneath her own body, a tangible boulder pushing her deeper and deeper into the earth.

Asmodeus is looking at her — _into_ her — and Himiko screams again as she feels her fingers being crushed to bone and dust.

She flails, tightly, desperately, feeling horribly like an upturned beetle, and Asmodeus pushes her down further. _Where_ — _are_ — _THEY_? Her mind shrieks questions she cannot answer, for all around her is a terrible kind of blackness, like tar is being steadily poured over them.

Alone in the dark with Asmodeus. She can see the gold-rimmed holes staring at her, the gaping, depthless mouth grinning at her, a tongue lolling in triumph like a wolf ready to devour its quarry.

From somewhere far away, uncontrollably delirious high-pitched laughter is ricocheting about the tar-smeared universe.


	14. Key To Life

**Author's Note**: The last line of the chapter is ehm, _modified_ from _Julius Caesar_, where Antony says "marred, as you see, with traitors," indicating Caesar's butchered corpse.

**Rabid Lola**, ouch, I think you're right. Akabane was more ... verbose than what is decent, and I'm currently scheming up ways to rectify that.

**Aquarius Galuxy**, you said the last chapter doesn't clear any of the questions about Akabane and Kagami— could you tell me what those questions are? I didn't know I left _that_ many strings hanging ... The questions you did bring up are good and interesting, and rest assured, Himiko, too, will be asking answers to the obvious ones. (And yeah— you're right about Kagami. I just see him as seeing Himiko in that light.) VERY flattered by what you said about Asmodeus, since it was my first try at an evil supervillain.

**omasuoniwabanshi**, Ban's knowing Himiko's in trouble is purely instinctive. He knows Himiko and Asmodeus and Akabane fit into the same equation, and when he sees Ginji sensing a coldness he links to Asmodeus— he just puts two and two together. He feels guilty because he knows she's in trouble, that he has this "chivalrous" obligation to help her, but at the same time he can't. For convenience's sake, Asmodeus in this story is "she," but in Jewish canon, it was a "he." Your analysis of Kagami, btw, was bang-on. That's the same impression I get of him, too. Thanks again for all that you said about Asmodeus. That OC is my pride and joy— glad to hear she was freaky!

**LuvInu88**, I love cliffhangers too— another one with this chapter.

**Jomai**, I'm really glad you think my writing's good, but at the same time, I DO get a little slow with spanning out chapters— I'm really sorry for making you wait for them, but I honestly _do_ try to post faster...

* * *

**Chapter Fourteen**

**Key to Life **

Only in darkness do you recognise light.

Lady Poison's nearly broken, wildly groping fingers find the strangest object. Human beings are oddly instinctive. Her fingers close around her last hope of winning this horrifically-matched fight, right when—

Asmodeus crushes her harder, pushing her further into the ground, as all around them the air is clearing and fuming with a sonata of splintering glass.

Himiko's poisons are spiralling lazily into the air, drifting curling, floating.

Pushing, shoving, invading, contaminating Asmodeus herself.

For a minute, Himiko's heart waits, beating feebly, forgetting to hammer through her chest. Trapped in the safety valve of her lungs, is the air she has exactly inhaled— the last vestiges of her Flame Scent, contaminated by concocted acceleration. But seven poisons crushed and rattled together— what if they affect Asmodeus? What if they make her immeasurably stronger? Indestructible?

But Himiko doesn't think she can hear her own thoughts, lost in the rising, falling wild roar in her ears. She feels something loosening, detaching, and then a glass-splitting shriek.

Tears splintering her eyes, blood nearly exploding in her veins, she can barely see Asmodeus stiffen, the shrill, inhuman yowling still rising from the arch of a demonic throat.

Time swoops past in a scornful rush— waiting for no one, nothing, in a fiery waltz and flying swirling skirts, throwing up the dust of blindness into their eyes.

Himiko shoots from the ground as if she's been fired from a gun — jerking forward, her clenched right hand slashing cleanly in a knife-like line across the hollow beneath Asmodeus's jaw. A scream, white, brittle fingers shoving her away, grabbing her right hand, twisting, cutting.

The motorcycle keys and serrated edges are falling, silently falling to the ground.

Shimmers shooting into the air, an invisible crystal shield materialising between the two of them such that Himiko can barely see Asmodeus anymore through the frosted diamond.

Air begins to glint — the first and only warning — and suddenly it is ripped by a iridescent haze of silver scalpels shooting straight into the air, their infallible points bared like beautiful, fanged twinkles at the moon, and then they begin their slow, measured, calculated descent, falling together, aimed at one thing and one thing alone—

In the immeasurable second Asmodeus flinched away from Lady Poison, there comes the rainshower of deadly knives embedding themselves straight and deeply into her back.

The wild flapping of the voluminous clothes, the flyway hair still, hasn't stopped. On her knees like an anchored ship in the blustery storm, Asmodeus remains frozen, marred by the traitor that is death.


	15. Cryptic

**Author's Note**:This story will end only with the epilogue, and this chapter isn't it. It does have a point, and I haven't reached it so far— half the climax isn't done yet. I promise you, what follows will most certainly be entertaining.

I'm sorry that right now I'm a bit of a crazy rush, so I can't reply to each person who reviewed (thanks to all of you!!!) but I'm just going to post this and run— but beware, you'll hear from me again soon!

* * *

**Chapter Fifteen**

**Cryptic **

"You — _killed_—?"

Dr. Jackal moves forward like the night, gliding through time and distance. Himiko blinks, and his hand his on her shoulder, looking down at the finally still huddled that is Asmodeus, pitched forward on her face.

"We are victors, standing the spoils of war," he whispers slowly, his lips stretching in a slow, sneering, unmistakably malicious smile, as he lowers into a crouch to inspect the body on the ground. She shudders at the sight of him, and can still feel Kagami's distant presence on the edges of consciousness.

Without knowing how or why, she realizes then she is not alone in her scorn of Kuroudo Akabane's crude, childish triumph.

"Is she really _dead_?" repeated Himiko, repeating mechanically the volley of questions sheer incredulity attacks her with. The breeze sweeps low on the barren field, to some ghost standing on the street, the moonlight twinkles eerily through the gaps of the chain-link fence; it is not a night for mortals.

A voice, pitched low, answers: "Asmodeus can never _die_. She is not ev—"

"She's dead, Lady Poison," cuts in Kagami's razor-edge voice, ending in a mocking tilt that has replaced the protective familiarity his actions have let slip. To Akabane, he sneers, "Let's not get too ... _philosophical_."

Without the coat, without the hat, the jackal is no less formidable.

His eyes are like the ice that froze the world. Being numbed from inside, Himiko can only read his cryptic lips: _Ignorance is suicide_. She sees the jeering contempt in Kagami, naked as he merely smirks.

A squawk.

A shiver plunging down backs, ice frosting on their skin.

A bellow explodes somewhere.

"_MOVE_!"

Leaping, flashing white, violet, green and black, and the dreaded colour— darkness. Lady Poison whirls out of the way, heart thudding hard enough to rip out of her throat, able to move, able to dive, able to escape because Himiko pulses inside with triumph. _This time I am armed with the knowledge you can be hurt_.

Akabane's solid, sinewy body blocks her from the being uncoiling itself from the ground, rising in lazy spirals, limbs shooting everywhere. His breath hisses like burning steam, "_Asmodeus_..."

Still alive.

Once more, on the fringes of conscious movement, Kagami is fixated. Unable to blink. The sight of Asmodeus rising from the dead makes him believe in immortality; the renewal of dead belief cannot contain the greed surging up him like the hungry tide.

The scalpels glint, piercing through the bed of Asmodeus's back, and beneath its trappings, the clothes billow like tattered sails. For a minute, irrational, unthinking, Himiko really believes that within those clothes Asmodeus has no body— only those hands, only those eyes—

Hunched and crumpled, broken with the weight of imposed death, she slowly, eerily starts to turn. Her hair is flapping across her face, and the gold flash of demonism that are her eyes visible in flashes. Her voice is rumbling, guttural, no longer horrendously beautiful:

"_Fiends who dare to attack me_!"

The voice, detached, booming, exploding, honey like when all that one expects from a demon's throat is maggots that crawl painfully out of the fires of hell.

Dr. Jackal's gloves are now fanged with scalpels, Kagami is elusive and Himiko dares not turn around to find him. Her heart beats to the unheard raggedy tempo thumping in the air. _She knows she is unarmed and defenceless_.

Like a black and white bat, he sweeps low to the ground, brushing against the face of the earth as he charges, barely touching it like a hound of hell. Meagrely assembled of scraps of cloth and horny hands, Asmodeus turns to stall him, but jackals are agile, greedy for blood— he waltzes around her, his scalpels tearing her face to ribbons as he dances past her— away from her.

Confusing flashes of white hands claw at the swift dodging shape of Akabane as he falls away, further and further, until its no longer a dance, but he's reeling.

Ugly wisps churn in the air, like an invisible maelstrom playing with them— wisps of cloth and Asmodeus's hair, and the ground is splashed with red as blood drips down Dr. Jackal's body.

"_Blood_, _that poisoned fruit of mortality_," drawls a voice crawlingly. Kagami. Meaningfully.

Carelessly, Dr. Jackal eyes the remnants of the second battle, this time lost. "Blood," he repeats slowly, languorously, deliberately. The wind cannot sweep back the strands of greasy, inky hair. Cannot curtain the cold grab for triumph leaping in those inhuman, inhumane violet eyes.

One hand extended before him, one throat intoning the weapon of fear. Red like a demon's flicking tail, the Bloody Sword appears in the clenched grip of Dr. Jackal's fist.

Wielding it like its made of paper-metal, and not weighed down by the gallons of blood it has sucked out, he stands, his body firm, only his wrists agile. And then it seems like time is moving far too fast because he's on his moving feet and so is Asmodeus— two creatures moulded out of blackness, ready to, prepared to, wanting to collide into one another. For an irrational moment, each wonders if the impact of collision will be powerful enough to merge them both together.

After all, are they even different?

The question is fatal.

Kuroudo Akabane knows himself. It is not a question he would have ever stooped low enough to ask himself, for he calls himself above fear and above creation of terror. He is a man of unfulfilled desire, not a meagre bodiless terrorist. The question — sheer fallacy — is imposed, shoved into his mind through the crevices of curiosity. It is Asmodeus's doing.

And the crevices have marginally widened to allow his pride to retort and his vanity to muse.

In that half a second of distraction, he feels like his shoes have been whisked away from beneath him, the lurching, swooping sensation of his stomach plummeting.

His back is pressed flat against the shed that is this black kingfisher's perch, and his hands are empty, whereas it is the flat arch-less palms of Asmodeus's hands that dig into his shoulders, prepared to smash through bone and slam against the wall.

Lady Poison screams silently in coerced muteness. She wants to dodge and duck into the fray, help him like he's helped her, but beneath her raggedy, hammering pulse throbbing in all her blood vessels, something is very deliberately withholding her.

Her sense.

Because even if she flinches, diamond — the most valued possession of the materialistic world — will cut her into pretty, pretty ribbons.

"Trapped, aren't you, my pet caged ferret?" croons Asmodeus's guttural voice, rattling up her throat, choked with the rage of one who will never tolerate impudence. Dr. Jackal's eyes are narrowed slits through which he silently, fixatedly, furtively studies the world.

"We shall see," and before the gash of her mouth can further widen into an ugly leer, the air _swchapp!_s like a whiplash, and something long, sharp, lethal and red— a javelin shoots straight at Asmodeus.

She has the breath left to spit, "_Indeed_," into his face, before her invisible puppeteer whisks her away. Himiko can feel the razor's edge of shredded diamond in the inside of her mouth as she really does try to scream the last warning he will ever hear— her eyes never blinking (forgotten how to) as she watches the sword pierce the jackal, pinning him to the wall like an animal speared to a tree, like a carcass nailed to a door.

Instead, there has fallen the weight of a hand on her shoulder, and a voice beside her. "_Himiko_."

With a shiver, she jerks up her chin to look back into those same eyes she thought she would never seen open again. Yamato Kudo.


	16. Death, The Greatest Illusion Of Them All

**Author's Note**: **Warning**: the end is yet to come.

Kagami's pearl of wisdom is modified from Shakespeare ("Cowards die many times before their death,") altered suitably to make it sound like a warning.

* * *

**Chapter Sixteen**

**Death, The Greatest Illusion Of Them All**

A lifetime of tears explodes into a single, all-encompassing question,

"_Who_ are you?"

His eyes are soft when he looks at her, his mouth forming the same embracing smile for her. There are lines around his mouth, a sunken depth to his eyes, and the flash of white amid his head of dark silken hair makes her recoil in horror.

She repeats carefully after her unbelieving shock, her heart pleading for mercy from this — the cruellest joke of all — and says, "You're not supposed to be alive." It costs grains of blood to say it.

"Some things can transcend life and death," he says heavily, smiling nonetheless. His hand is still on her shoulder.

It's like a boulder constricting her need to breathe reality when she gently removes that hand (electric jolt as her skin touches his— she can _touch_ him) to turn around to face him.

"Can it bring back Akabane?" The words fall out of her mouth without her realizing it's the only thing she wants to know. Her eyes beseech her phantom brother, and he remembers that look from childhood days long gone, yet unforgotten.

His tongue is like lead in his mouth. "One life for another. Asmodeus killed your friend over there, and that was how I came back to life..."

She can't stand. Her knees buckle like they're not even there, and she collapses like deck of unbalanced cards.

She can't stand the finality in his voice. But something's trying to squeeze out of her throat, and she croaks, "You're an illusion."

Asmodeus _has_ invaded Lady Poison's mind before; she's trying the same thing now. Yamato smiles gently, cocking his head. Louder now, Lady Poison repeats what she's said. Some part of her deep inside her is mourning for what she's about to lose — the safety of illusions — but she repeats resolutely: "You're not real. Akabane's still alive."

Suddenly remembering, she spins around, and Kagami is still there. Like Yamato Kudo, he, too, smiles.

"There's no one in front of me!" shouts Himiko, but Kagami makes no move to indicate he has heard. Two odd things occur simultaneously in the half-second after Himiko opens her mouth: she feels no sound emit from her throat, she sees Kagami's forehead fleetingly dissolve into lines of perplexity.

And then its over.

Slow, stately tread, no indication that an enemy (or friend) has fallen, Kagami starts to leave. Despair clutches at Himiko's heart as he moves past her, and she mumbles his name. Kyoji Kagami stops for no one; but as he passes her by, he says, "All men die twice— once because of the fear of death, and once because of death itself."

* * *

Himiko feels time tick inexorably past her. She doesn't care. She only tries to make sense out of it all.

Words. The clues lie in the words. The cryptic exchanges flying between Kagami and Akabane, so meaningful, so hinting.

What had Akabane said?

"_Asmodeus can never _die_. She is not ev_—"

"_She's dead, Lady Poison_," To Akabane, Kagami had sneered, "_Let's not get too_ ... philosophical."

Philosophical? What had Akabane been about to say? Asmodeus is not even alive? That, Himiko realizes, is true. Asmodeus is a Hebrew demon, the devil of those who sin in lust. All right, one riddle cracked.

Then that mad rushing maelstrom of a fight.

"_Blood_, _that poisoned fruit of mortality_."

It is easy, in retrospect, to see what _that_ was about. Kagami had been giving ... advice. To use one of Dr. Jackal's "bloody" weapons.

Oh, it was all so easy— the senseless fear of the last days were nothing in comparison to this. What had Akabane mouthed?— _Ignorance is suicide_. Hadn't he been right?

Nothing made sense anymore. Not Yamato. Not Akabane. Certainly not Asmodeus. Something is hammering inside her heart, some forgotten, locked-away pain.

Kagami's last words (something is telling her it was the last time they'd see each other— she will miss him): "All men die twice— once because of the fear of death, and once because of death itself."

Who? _Who_ was he talking about? Asmodeus or Akabane? Akabane or Yamato?

Could Akabane be afraid of death? It seems so plausible— like oppressors fear no one more than the oppressed, it would be so beautifully ironic if it were true.

* * *

Her hand is slipped into his. Her head is resting on his shoulder. His arm is around her. He feels so real. She feels so safe.

"Are you real?" she asks again, as he leads her away from that barren plot of land, the two of them walking away from the chain-link fence. She stares resolutely at her feet, mesmerised by how they move when she walks.

His one-armed embrace tightens. "What do you think?"

"I think you're an illusion."

"No you don't," he says gently, "it's what you want to believe."

The streetlights flicker and blink over their heads as they pass beneath, strolling on the pavement. She's grown so much, he still seems the same. He doesn't smoke; vaguely, she remembers seeing his lighter in Ban's possession. She remembers the last time that she saw Ban — the memory seems so distant — it was only earlier that night.

Is it a long walk back home? She doesn't remember. She remembers walking down this path with Kagami, walking towards death and invasion and fear. Now she's walking back — with _him_ — walking back home.

Yamato won't recognize it; it's too far, too remote, too isolated from the home he used to know. They'd start from scratch: her and him. A new life. A new world. Them together. It would be beautiful.

They say nothing and keep on walking, crossing the street where they have to, hurrying like a pair of ghosts to avoid the light. They fall into companionable tandem, so unlike that vague oblivion, crackling with tension, she'd felt with Kagami earlier.

Akabane is dead. The weight of that is not sinking into her properly. It is a light, fluttery feel now, and Himiko knows that the tears will come later.

They stop beneath the shadow of her building. She remembers walking down this pavement to meet Idashi — only a few days ago — Ban at her heels.

She tells her brother suddenly, a little warningly: "I don't want to wake up to find this is an illusion, you know."

He laughs lightly. "Stop it. It'll _be_ an illusion if you keep thinking that's what this is."

She glances up at him, a little shyly. "What would you believe if you were in my position?"

Blankly, he stares ahead for a long moment, saying nothing; then he drops his gaze back into her eyes. He says quietly, "I wouldn't know where to start, who to thank."


	17. Snatches

**Chapter Seventeen**

**Snatches**

As the bell tinkles, he looks up, but sees only Natsumi. He smiles — she smiles back — he gives Ginji a hard nudge, gets groaned at, while Natsumi receives a radiant smile. It is yet another shamefully normal morning at the Honky Tonk.

Paul is behind the newspaper at same bar that Ginji is sleeping on, deaf to Ban's entreaties, requests, threats, and begging for breakfast. The sight of Natsumi helping out before school starts is an encouraging promise of food. Hevn is utterly disgusted.

"_Ban_," Her voice is dangerously bordering on a growl. "I'm tired of asking. What the hell happened?"

He shoots her an annoyed glance; Paul gives her more grateful appreciation. "Whaddaya mean _what happened_? I'm going to starve— that's what _will_ happen."

"To Himiko, Ban. She and Jackal. They've been missing for two days."

The irate expression slides slowly off his face, like honey sleeking away. "I don't know," he drawls slowly. "Maybe she's on vacation." No one — not even Paul, this time — is deaf to that hollow ring of Ban Mido's swaggering, cocky voice.

* * *

The past two days have slipped past, melted into two hours— created out of nothing but unadulterated, unthinking happiness. Grief — the butterfly brushing past Himiko's cheek — burns away slowly in the candle-flame of her brightly burning joy. 

Incomprehension has turned to something lighter, better, something that holds her high above the world. Give and take. Asmodeus — creature, demon — has snapped Kuroudo Akabane's neck. But with the life stolen from the god of Death himself, she has brought back Yamato Kudo. Give and take. Take what you receive.

Himiko's the last person to argue.

* * *

The nights are different all the time— doubt crawls out of the woodwork, and knowing he sleeps, breathing to prove he's alive, makes Himiko's skin prickle. There is anger, inexplicable rage that Yamato Kudo should be living when he's not. That Akabane should be sacrificed on the demonic altar, his life in exchange for her brother's. What does that make her— since she's the one who wishes for this deep down inside? 

In the morning, things are different. His smile hovering inches above her, close enough to touch, to prove it's real this time, not another dream— it makes all the difference in the world.

* * *

Life is strange, new, fast-moving until no single moment can be pinned down and held and examined and remembered. Himiko and Yamato lock up her lonely, empty, haunted flat to move in _together_ to their old house. Everything has changed in there— dust has overwritten the history of love, loyalty, sacrifice, hate. Now on the blank tablet, they have to start again. 

Just the two of them.

When she sometimes sits beneath the window, pressed against the wall and drowning in the sunlight, she remembers Ban. But he can't stay with them— he'd not understand. His life is elsewhere. That's how Yamato explains it, and sometimes when he speaks, he sounds like a stranger. Those are the times she can't see his eyes, and she wonders if the words he spits out hurts him also.


End file.
